The Skylight Frame and Calendar Are 20% Off on Cyber Monday.
If you have children and those children have grandparents, a Skylight frame can have a holiday gift for them and a Skylight calendar for you.
Smart photo frames are the perfect gift for grandparents. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were invented as a way to send photos to grandparents when they first hit the market. 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 realized that the app can be a cumbersome technical hurdle for some seniors, 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. It does a few things very simply: send and receive framed photos with whom you want to share them, 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 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 the screen 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 to sleep at night to prevent light from disturbing it. Wi-Fi remains securely connected, but most of the time you can disconnect the frame from Wi-Fi and it will work fine—you just need to reconnect it every now and then to get new 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
I think parents should consider using the Skylight Smart Calendar for themselves when they buy the relatives a frame, because the whole point of image sharing is that it goes 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.
The calendar has most of the features of the Skylight photo frame: you can send and receive images from other people, regardless of whether they have Skylight, 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 the same way you share photos. Skylight will even tell you the weather forecast for the time and location of your events.
What are the cons of the Skylight calendar?
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 for the families I know.
Is there a monthly fee?
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.
Bottom line: This is a great Cyber Monday buy.
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.