Hands-on with the Twinkly Flex RGB Light Tube
Amy Flower
STACK Senior Editor
With their Flex, Twinkly have said “Phooey!” to smart lighting limitations and have really changed the game, delivering a smart lighting strip that's bendable and twistable to your whim.
Want to craft anything from a squiggle to a musical note, or a wavy line to a Christmas tree? Go for it! It’s crazy-flexible, and there are very few limitations to the shapes that you can create with the two-metre length. It’s a bit like neon tubing – if it were actually flexible.
If the Twinkly Flex’s ability to become almost anything that you can imagine isn’t impressive enough, every single LED light within it can be individually controlled – all 192 of them. What?! Yep, really! The free Twinkly smartphone app is the key. Set up your design – a bunch of handy mounting clips and holders are included to keep it in place on your wall or wherever you’ve set it up – then snap a pic with the app and it maps things so that you can take total control. Have some LEDs twinkling, have others always on, set individual colours (from a palette of some 16 million) and even create wild colour gradients and animations.
"If two metres just isn’t enough Twinkly for you, great news is that it’s expandable."
If you just want something that looks cool without getting into the nitty-gritty of programming (even though it’s surprisingly simple to accomplish), there are oodles of pre-set colour schemes and animations in the Twinkly app that will impress the socks off you, or anybody else who happens to encounter your cool new Twinkly setup (and is wearing socks).
Meanwhile, Twinkly Flex is compatible with all the usual smart home helpers like Google, Alexa, and Apple HomeKit, and doesn’t require any sort of separate bridge device – everything that you need to get it going (well, save for a smartphone) is right there in the box. If you have a Razer RGB lighting setup within your computer rig then you can also hook your Flex into its Chroma ecosystem for some serious lighting synergy.
If two metres just isn’t enough Twinkly for you, great news is that it’s expandable. Up to ten Flex devices can be connected – use ten Flex units and that’s a whopperous 20 metres of lighting fun! There’s also a cool USB device – sold separately – that’s known simply as Twinkly Music. This fun little doodad can pick up then interpret any musical source within its earshot and have your Twinkly Flex react in time to your tunes. Depending upon the size of your Twinkly setup it can be like being right in the midst of one of those classic graphic equalizers from back in the 1980s, except bigger and way cooler.
The phrase “only limited by your imagination” is bandied about a lot, and can often be a dubious claim. The Twinkly Flex can shout it from the rooftops, happy in the knowledge that it’s the truth – this is a very cool, very creative bit of kit that can really transform a smart space in your home, office, garage, she shed, man cave… you name it!
It's Twinkly time!
^Discounts apply to previous ticketed/advertised price prior to the discount offer. As we negotiate, products will likely have been sold below ticketed/advertised price prior to the discount offer. Prices may differ at airport stores.
