Twinkly - Smart Light String 250 LED RGB Generation II - Multi

I love the ease and amazing design options for these lights. I use them for every holiday and during summer. The app makes it easy. Pricey but worth it.

This is my second review a product from Twinkly (I reviewed the STRING + DOT here as well). I started with this smaller set of lights, and FELL IN LOVE with them and bought more!! I used two short sets (two of the 100-light Strings) for the 5-foot tree in photo. They are EASY to pair with your phone, EASY to map all sets for making all-over patterns (do that after ALL SETS are on your tree or home.) Your phone maps and saves the position of individual lights, and then you can go nuts with patterns and colors, and make and save your own colors, animation speeds, or pattern edits. Totally cool. This will save me money, since I can put these 2 smaller light strings on my small porch trees, and re-program them for each season!! I will love that, instead of buying yet another color for each season. The photo is during the day, which shows how super bright they are. At night they are stellar!!!

I randomly ran across this line of “smart” lights last week and picked up a couple of the 100-light sets to mess around with. I’ll say up front that I’m very happy with them. Here’s a few random notes on my experience. The first thing I wondered was exactly how long the lighted portion of the string actually is. The specs for the 100-light set is 26.25 feet. I’ve attached a photo showing the distance between each light is 3 inches. With a 100-light set, there’s 99 spaces between each light, meaning your actual lighted length is 24.75 feet. Upon first plugging in the lights, I was very pleased with how bright they are. I don’t see an official listed brightness anywhere off a quick google search but they’re definitely sufficient. The colors are extremely vibrant and show very well in the dark. On an iPhone 13, I didn’t really have any issues getting them connected. On the first strand, I did have to try it a couple of times, then restart the app to get it to go, but I believe that’s because I had already launched the app and had it searching before I held down the button on the lights to put it into findable mode. The app doesn’t seem to like searching before there’s something to search for. On the second strand of lights, I first put the lights into findable mode and then launched the app, no problems. I was within a foot of the lights with my phone and they read each other fine. My two strands of lights are wrapped around the two small columns on my front porch so I really can’t comment on the scan. I did do a scan but since they’re just wrapped around, it seemed kind of pointless, so I deleted it. There’s more than enough patterns built-in and downloadable to keep me entertained and switching it up every night. A few of the patterns rely on a “curtain” of lights but a lot of them still look good just randomly wrapped around my porch columns. Of note is that by default, it considers the very last light on the string to be the “top”, so if you’re doing effects like falling snow, then you’ll want to mind how you hang your lights vertically. Lastly, there is a somewhat hidden “sync” option on the last tab of the app. Where I had two strings of lights, I couldn’t initially find a way to make them do the same thing at the same time. I set them both individually to the same pattern, which was changing through colors, but they were going through different colors. After I couldn’t find a way to link them, I instead starting trying to time when to turn the second string on so the colors would get close. I eventually found the small chain icon in the upper-right of the last tab of the app that lets you link strings together, which solved my problem. The only thing I wish was here was a way to control the lights when I’m away from the house. The only time the app works is when you’re on the same Wi-Fi network as the lights. This is completely understandable because there is no hub or software to be able to talk to over the internet, but it would be nice if it were an option in the future. I’ll come back and edit my review later if anything goes wrong, I’ve only had them for a week.