A Skylight Frame and Calendar Make Great Family Tools.
If you have kids, and those kids have grandparents, a Skylight frame might make sense for them as a holiday gift, and for you, a Skylight calendar , which you can get 25% off starting today on the web -Skylight website . using code BLACKFRIDAY!.
Smart photo frames are digital frames that display photos you’ve downloaded and make the perfect gift for grandparents. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were invented as a way to send photos to grandparents when they hit the market 30 years ago. But now even our grandparents use smartphones, so a smart frame can offer a little more than just taking photos from your phone. The Skylight Frame offers a wider picture on a much nicer display than phones or even tablets. The touchscreen is in a clean, modern frame (it’s available in a variety of frame colors and 10- or 15-inch sizes) with a low profile and looks exactly like a photo frame, except for the power cord snaking out the back. Skylight makes two products: Frame and Calendar, which look similar but work slightly differently – and I’ll talk about both and who they’re suitable for.
Clearance frame
The whole idea of Frame is to share photos either one way or back and forth. To submit images, you either email them to a dedicated email address or share them through the app (you’ll need to create a link and then send it via email or text asking them to download the app and log in ). You). While the idea of sending photos via email seemed clunky at first, I was reminded that for many grandparents the app is a cumbersome technical hurdle, and the multiple levels of authorization make parents feel secure. The older target audience also explains the simplicity and large clear user interface of the application. The app doesn’t have many features or options, nor does it have many controls. The app does a few things very simply: send and receive photos into frames you want to share them with, or generate a sharing link. Once the photos are delivered, you will be able to choose which ones you want to place in your frame.
The frame is easy to use, but it only has one job.
The frame does a good job of making portrait images look like they belong, even if the frame is hanging in landscape, by padding the margins. While you don’t need a subscription plan to send and view photos, you can upgrade to a Frame or Calendar subscription for $40 per year to add video to the mix. The frame comes with the world’s easiest wall mount and a separate stand in the box if you want it to hang on your desk. It features a modern low-profile power cord. Online setup took less than 10 minutes—all you really have to do is connect Frame to Wi-Fi. The touch screen is very responsive; you swipe to move between settings screens and to view photos. However, you can leave the frame alone after setting it up and it will work fine, automatically playing images on its own. You can use the settings to automatically put it into sleep mode at night to prevent light from disturbing it. Wi-Fi remains securely connected, but if your relatives still don’t trust online devices in their home, you can disconnect the frame from Wi-Fi most of the time and it will work fine – plug it in every now and then to get new ones photos. The level of control the app offers over Frame is ideal for connecting generations of users, and I love that you can use all the core features of the product without a subscription.
Consider the Calendar as your base
A few friends with children had already bought roof windows and I thought they would have them as well from the grandparents, but I was surprised that my friends often just bought them for their parents and skipped one for themselves – they only thought about sending photos to other people rather than receiving them. However, I think parents should consider a Skylight calendar when they buy a frame for relatives, because the whole point of sharing images is that it works both ways. Your children will likely benefit from seeing photos of their grandparents, which will keep relatives interested and encourage them to interact more. Cousins share photos, send videos as holiday surprises—it’s all about interactivity, and you can do it all with Calendar and more.
Calendar has most of the functionality of Frame—you can send and receive images from others, whether they have Skylight or not, either through the app or through dedicated email. But first and foremost it is a calendar aggregation tool. You can sync calendars with a variety of other platforms, including Google, Apple, Outlook, Yahoo, Cozi, and Readdle calendars, and it combines them all into one shared calendar that you can view by day, week, or month. Subscription makes much more sense in a calendar – it means you can forward flyers or emails from school and Skylight will turn them into calendar events, and since you can sync both ways (in and out of Skylight), it updates the original calendars . Even without a subscription, you can customize fonts, colors, and other aspects of the calendar. You can share these calendars just like photos, and Skylight will even tell you the weather forecast for the time and location of your events.
Interesting but less necessary features
The calendar also offers to-do lists, shopping lists, and meal plans that you can add, edit, and display. These are all great features, but I suspect that, as for me, all the features are already supported by other platforms. And unlike calendar sync, you can’t merge these other platforms. The only place you will see this information is in your application. Skylight may imagine a family sitting around a Calendar as a platform for planning their week together, but that’s not the reality of the families I know.
Bottom line: This is a great Black Friday buy.
And this is where I think Skylight could really go for iteration – if it looked at Calendar and Frame as aggregation centers. People are already doing everything offered in Frame and Calendar elsewhere; The value is a physical hub from which families can quickly check in—an easy way to check in on the day’s events before running out the door, or see if there’s a new video from grandma, or quickly skim the month. I’d rather just have a folder in my Google Photos or Apple Drive that I could throw things in and it would sync the frame to it, rather than having to email or use another app. I’d like it to combine my Todoist lists and even maybe Asana. While Skylight Calendar offers much more functionality and flexibility than Frame, this is where it can really shine. At $160 for the small calendar or $299 for the large one, it’s a tough sell for what a decent tablet can do. However, with a 25% discount they become much more attractive – so take advantage of this offer.