Jalen Sigh Tech

Verdict

If you love Christmas and like to light up your garden, then the Twinkly Reindeers are for you. Brilliantly designed and powerful, these models have 200 individually controlled LED lights, giving a choice of solid colours or a wide-range of dynamic effects. The ultimate in fun, these lights are expensive, but if you want the best, they’re a great addition to any household.

Introduction

King of the smart Christmas lights, the Twinkly Reindeers is the company’s first foray into fixed lights, arranged around a model, with a choice of two reindeer (doe or stag).

These lights are not cheap, but the lights are brilliant fun, with a huge choice of animated effects or solid colours. If you’re looking to brighten up your outside for Christmas, look no further.

Design and Setup

• Choice of doe or stag models
• Small amount of assembly
• Connects via Wi-Fi

Most of Twinkly’s smart lights are strings of lights in some form or other, whether that’s the net of lights in the Twinkly Curtain or the traditional Christmas tree lights that adorn the pre-lit Balsam Hill Nordmann Fir.

The Twinkly Reindeers are different, as the lights are fixed to model reindeer. There’s a choice of model, with the stag that I have on review (£249.99) or the slightly smaller Doe (£229.99). Both are suitable for use outside.

Both types work in the same way, and if you’re feeling particularly flashy, you can buy multiple of each and group them together into one massive Christmas display.

Setting up the lights is easy, although there’s a bit of building to be done. With my stag, I had first to clip its head into place. It’s a little stiff to get it attached securely, needing a bit of force to clip it together properly.

Then, I had to attach the antlers. Again, they’re a bit stiff to get into place, needing some force to clip them securely to the head.

That’s it for assembly, as the lights are pre-wired into the model, with the power cable trailing off to the control unit and mains plug. Reindeers are free-standing, although Twinkly does provide pegs if you want to anchor your model to the ground.

Once assembled and plugged in, the Reindeers light up, ready for connection to the Twinkly app. A Bluetooth connection is made first, and then the lights are connected to your Wi-Fi network.

Features and Performance

• Huge choice of effects
• Fiddly scanning routine
• Works with HomeKit

Once in the app, the Reindeers can be controlled much like any other set of smart lights, with a choice of colours, effects and brightness. Twinkly suggests mapping the lights using your phone to get effects that best match the physical layout of the lights.

For the most accurate mapping, you need to use the 3D mapping option, using your phone’s camera to scan the lights from different angles. I find this process fiddly to get right, and it needs to be dark enough for my camera to accurately read the lights.

I get why this process has to be done with the other lights, as you can string them up in different ways, adjusting where each LED is. Here, the 200 LEDs are pre-configured and attached to the reindeer model. It feels as though Twinkly should just be able to automatically import the light layout for these products, and avoid having to manually scan them.

Once you’re done, the level of control is excellent. At its simplest, the lights can be set to a single solid colour or colour temperature, with a choice of brightness.

That can look nice, as you can see below, but a single colour is a bit dull.

Twinkly Effects are way more fun, with a wide choice of dynamic lighting patterns that vary from rapidly rolling waves of colour, to sparkly, twinkling lights. Each effect can be customised with a choice of colours and transition speed.

There’s a live preview of the lights on the Reindeers, but to use the setting you’ve chosen, the effect has to be applied and saved to the Controller. Up to 15 effects can be saved, selectable from the app or by hitting the button on the controller to switch through the settings.

When the memory is full, you must delete existing effects to add new ones. Annoyingly, you have to delete effects starting at the last one you’ve added. If you want to get rid of the first effect you added, you may potentially have to delete 15 effects in total and then rebuild your list.

Outside of this issue, the lighting effects are brilliant. Fully lit in a dynamic lighting pattern, the reindeer look incredible. I’ve had several people round, and they’ve all been transfixed by the lights; these models give off a proper Christmas feel.

Part of the beauty of these lights, and Twinkly lights in general, is that each of the 200 LEDs is individually controlled, which makes for more engaging and dynamic effects.

Get multiple Reindeers, and you can pair them together in a group and control them all as one large set of lights. Sure, that’s an expensive undertaking, but if you’ve got the cash and want a herd of Reindeer, the group control is a nice touch.

Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support are available, with voice control to toggle the lights, set brightness and a solid colour. There’s no option to use voice to select an effect, though.

That’s the same with the HomeKit integration, which gives you on/off, brightness and colour control only.

Not that third-party integration isn’t useful. I’ve got my Reindeers set-up in HomeKit, so that a press of a Philips Hue Smart Button turns the lights on; a long-press turns them off.

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