If you have children, and those children have grandparents, a Skylight Frame might make a lot of sense as a holiday gift for them, with a Skylight Calendar for you, which you can nab at 25% off, starting today, on the Skylight website, using the code BLACKFRIDAY!.
Smart photo frames are digital frames that display pictures you upload, and they’re the perfect gift for grandparents. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were invented as a way to send pictures to the grandparents when they hit the market 30 years ago. But now, even our grandparents rock smartphones, so a smart frame has to offer a little more than pulling photos from your phone. The Skylight Frame offers a bigger picture in a much slicker display than phones or even tablets can. A touchscreen in a clean, modern frame (it comes in an array of frame colors and a 10- or 15-inch size) with a low profile, it looks exactly like a picture frame, except for the power cord snaking off the back. Skylight produces two products, the Frame and the Calendar, which look the same but operate a little differently—and I’ll talk about both and who they’re suited for.
The Skylight Frame
The whole idea of the Frame is to share photos, either one way or back and forth. To send images, you either email them to a dedicated email address, or share them via the app (you’ll need to generate a link, and then send them the link via email or text, which prompts them to download the app and authorize you). Although initially I found the notion of emailing photos to be clunky, I was reminded that for many grandparents, an app is a cumbersome technical obstacle, and many layers of authorization make parents feel safe. An older target audience also explains the simplicity and large, clean user interface of the app. The app doesn’t have a lot of functions or options, nor a lot of control. The app does a few things very simply: sends and receives photos to the frames you’d like to share them with, or generates a sharing link. Once the pictures have arrived, you can choose which you’d like to put into circulation on your Frame.
The Frame is easy to use, but it only has one job
Credit: Amanda Blum
The Frame does a good job of making portrait-oriented images seem like they belong, even when you have the frame hung in landscape, by backfilling the margins. While you don’t need a subscription plan to send and view photos, you can upgrade to a subscription on either the Frame or Calendar for $40 a year to add videos 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 out on a table. It has a modern, low-profile power cord. Online setup took fewer than 10 minutes—all you really need to do is connect the Frame to wifi. The touchscreen is highly responsive; you swipe to go between setting screens and to advance photos. That said, you could leave the frame alone once it’s set up and it would work just fine, auto playing images on its own. You can use the settings to automatically put it to sleep at night so the light isn’t bothersome. The wifi stays reliably connected, but if your relatives still don’t trust online devices in their home, you can disconnect the frame from wifi most of the time and it would work just fine—reconnect it occasionally to pick up new photos. The amount of control the app offers over the Frame is the perfect amount to bridge generations of users, and I like that you can perform all the basics of the product without a subscription.
Consider Calendar your home base
Credit: Amanda Blum
A number of friends with kids already have bought Skylights, and I figured they’d have one and the grandparents would have one, but I was surprised that my friends had often just gotten them for their parents and skipped on one for themselves—they’d only thought about sending pictures to other people, rather than receiving also them. That said, I think parents should consider a Skylight Calendar for themselves when they buy relatives a Frame, because the whole point of sharing images is that it goes both ways. Your kids will probably benefit from seeing photos of Grandma and Grandpa, and it keeps the relatives engaged, and encourages more interaction. Cousins sharing pictures back and forth, sending videos as a surprise for holidays—the point is interactivity, and you can do all of that with the Calendar, and more.
The Calendar has most of the functionality of the Frame—you can send and receive images from others, whether they have a Skylight or not, either via the app or dedicated email. But primarily, it’s a calendar aggregation tool. You can sync calendars from a slew of other platforms including Google, Apple, Outlook, Yahoo, Cozi, and Readdle Calendars and it aggregates them all to one shared calendar you can view by day, week, or month. A subscription makes much more sense on the Calendar—it means you can forward flyers or emails from school and Skylight will turn them into events on the calendar, and since you can sync both ways (to and from Skylight) it updates your source calendars. Even without a subscription, you can adjust fonts and colors and all sorts of other aspects of the calendar. You can share these calendars the way you share photos, and Skylight will even tell you the weather forecast at the time and location of your events.
Fun but less-necessary features
The Calendar also offers to-do lists, grocery lists, and meal plans you can add to, edit and display. These are all great functions, but I suspect, as they were for me, all functions already served by other platforms. And unlike the calendar sync, you can’t aggregate these other platforms. The only other place you’ll see that information is in your app. Skylight might imagine the family sitting around the Calendar as the platform for plotting out the week together, but that’s not the reality of families I know.
Bottom line: This is a great Black Friday buy
And that’s where I think Skylight could really iterate—if it saw the Calendar and Frame as aggregation hubs. People already do all of the things offered on the Frame and Calendar elsewhere; the value is the physical hub for the family to be able to quickly check in from—an easy way to check the day’s events before you run out the door, or to see if there’s a new video from Grandma, or to get a quick glance at the month. I’d prefer to simply have a folder in my Google Photos or Apple Drive that I can throw things into and it syncs the Frame to that, instead of emailing or going through another app. I’d love for it to aggregate my Todoist lists and even maybe Asana. While the Skylight Calendar does offer far more functionality and flexibility than the Frame, this is where it could really shine. At $160 for a small Calendar or $299 for a large, it’s a hard sell for the functions that a decent tablet would do. At 25% off, however, they become a lot more attractive—so take advantage of this deal.
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