Review: Skylight Calendar 2

I've been with my husband for 15 years. We've moved through several ages and communication tools together, from days of texting on our flip phones to the blue blues of our iMessages, shared Google Calendars I bullied him into using years ago, and finally, transforming a Discord server into our marriage super tool.

But what about a more physical option? Rather than leaving all of our communication online, requiring phones out at dinner to check tomorrow's schedule and struggling to remember the dinner ideas listed in Discord, there's a new solution: a digital calendar you can set on the counter or hang on the wall.

Skylight's digital calendars have been gaining popularity over the past year, and now there's a new one: the Calendar 2. The biggest change is the size, sitting now in the middle of Skylight's digital calendar lineup at 15 inches. It promises faster performance and also has interchangeable snap frames like Skylight's digital picture frame, the Frame 2, but otherwise it's the same device with the same set of tools and similar roadblocks. The Calendar 2 connects to your Wi-Fi and can sit on a tabletop or be mounted on the wall, so long as there's an outlet nearby to plug it into.

However, you'll hit the same wall my colleague Chris Haslam did when he tested the Calendar Max, Skylight's largest digital calendar device that launched last year: Unless every member of your family is ready to fully commit to this device, its wide range of features will go unused. But at half the price and nearly half the size of the Calendar Max, the Calendar 2 feels like a much more reasonable experiment and entry point for families.

A Digital Sync, IRL

Photograph: Nena Farrell

The Skylight Calendar 2, like Skylight's other digital calendars, lets you log in to your calendar program of choice, such as Google Calendar or Apple's Calendar, and have it immediately display on the interface. It was easy to sync my main Google calendar, and then the 2 showed me all the calendars that were synced to that one, in case I wanted to add them. In a snap, I had my main personal calendar, my work calendar, my husband's calendar, and even my private calendar of my friends' and family's birthdays synced to the Calendar 2.

Your calendars is the default page Calendar 2 shows you, but it's not all this device can do. There are several tabs you can click through: Lists, Tasks, Rewards, Meals, Recipes, and Photos, then Sleep and Settings. Besides Sleep and Settings, which both relate to different settings on your device, these pages will take some work to become truly useful. Some of these features are also blocked by a paywall. You'll need a Plus Plan subscription, which costs $79 a year or $8 a month, to get access to Rewards, Meals, and Skylight's in-app AI tool, Sidekick.

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Meals is easy to start casually using to plan out your meals for the week, but if you have a bunch of homemade recipes you love, you can manually add them to the Recipes tab. Why bother with adding an entire recipe? Because then, when you add that recipe to your meal list for the week, the Skylight will ask if it should also add the ingredients to your grocery list over on the Lists tab. I didn't love that every time I added one of my recipes manually it would ask if I wanted to add the ingredients to my shopping list, but it's a reasonable flow of actions and one that could be more useful if I converted to Skylight being my sole grocery shopping list.

I really like the visual aspect of both my family's calendar and the Meals page. I quickly typed in “Giant Meatball” for one of our dinners to represent a Costco dinner in our fridge and was able to assign it to Friday's dinner. You can either add items to your meal plan on Calendar 2 itself or in the Skylight app, which provides access to all the same pages you see on the device. The Calendar 2 doesn't seem to memorize any quick meals I write in, though; I'd have to save them to Recipes to use continually or mark them as a repeating meal on a specific day. I also love that if there's an event on both my husband's calendar and mine, the Skylight will only have it on the screen once and will put both colors for our calendars to indicate it's a shared event.

The Tasks page also works fine if you want a list of tasks for each family member, but even for tasks I set a certain time for, I didn't see any alerts on the device or my phone. Once I opened the Tasks page, I could see that I was two days late to “Bring Form to Dentist Appointment,” but I think these pages would be easy to ignore. It's something you'd have to build as a habit and shouldn't be relied on for a timed task you'd like to complete. Meanwhile, Rewards is linked to tasks, letting you set how many stars you need to earn by completing tasks to earn a reward you'll set for yourself or other members of your house, such as your kids.

The Paywalled Garden

Photograph: Nena Farrell

My biggest complaint with Skylight is its paywall. Its calendar devices require the Plus Plan ($79 a month or $8 a year) to use all features, including the photo screen saver, which I think is a huge bonus for the device. While Skylight isn't my favorite digital photo frame, and the 15-inch frame doesn't have the perfect orientation for showing photos, having the screen saver option turns the device into a great multiuse screen that the entire family can enjoy.

You'll also lose out on the Meals tool, and the Rewards page. These pages will still be visible, but functionality will be gone. I was only able to test Rewards myself, and while it was fun to set tasks for myself to earn the Cherry Ripe bar sitting in my pantry, I think these would be best suited to households with older children who can read and interact with the Skylight. My 3-year-old son will just want to tap buttons and swipe through pictures over and over. The font isn't so large that you can read it across a room, either. You'll need to be right next to the device to read the calendar and any other page, and the only way to interact with it is by touch.

ScreenshotSidekick via Nena Farrell

ScreenshotSidekick via Nena Farrell

ScreenshotSidekick via Nena Farrell

The Plus Plan also gives access to Skylight's AI tool, Sidekick. Sidekick isn't on the device itself, but can be accessed in the app and can import events, lists, recipes, and fridge photos onto your Skylight. It's honestly really useful. It converted my favorite breakfast recipe from a website in just a handful of seconds and easily added my dad's fondue recipe from a text screenshot. It was also able to add events to my calendar from screenshots I took on Instagram, but my preferred method was to record a voice note explaining what I wanted. I'm a voice note fanatic, so having a quick voice option is usually my preferred route.

It would be plenty easy to live without these bonuses. Most of my day-to-day with the Skylight involves tapping it to see the calendar. But losing the voice note feature and digital photo frame would be a big loss, and they are honestly worth paying more for in my opinion. The screen saver in particular transforms the device from just a family planner into a family planner and a digital photo frame everyone can enjoy.

If you're looking into replacing your smart display with one of these devices, there's certainly some overlap, but you'll lose as much as you gain. I really prefer that the calendar is what's instantly available, and it's designed as a tool for families instead of smart home support. You won't be able to voice-command your lights or ask the weather from across the room, or use the screen to stream TV shows. But I think the family-focused utility is popular for a reason. It's something that always feels like it has a use for my home, and digitizes tools we need versus stuffing features galore, hoping we'll like one. Plus, having no additional camera or microphone in your home is a pro for many of us.

An Adoption Game

Photograph: Nena Farrell

How useful the Calendar 2 is, or any other digital calendar device is, depends on how well your entire family adopts it.

Part of what made this calendar immediately useful for my husband and me is that we're already Google Calendar fanatics. We're both good about adding things to our calendars and usually invite the other if we know we're the one who wrote it down. My husband is usually the one remembering to add doctor and dentist appointments, while he's always getting a new invite from me about the next birthday party we've been invited to or playdate I've scheduled with a friend. It's been nice to have a physical representation of that work nearby when we're in the kitchen discussing plans or sitting together around the counter planning out our meals. The touch screen allows any family member to use it anytime, and I was able to invite my husband to download the Skylight app to control it that way too, if he wished. (So far, he has ignored that text.)

Things like Rewards and Tasks designed for the whole family to interact with consistently will take the longest to adopt, especially if you have little people in your home. I really like the idea of using it to encourage my son to build healthy daily habits, but I need him to learn to read first. It's a good fit for true kids rather than almost preschoolers, taking the classic chore chart and digitizing it. It's nice for us adults, too, who want to build better daily habits.

I do wish there were a microphone on the device to ask quick questions or voice-add an event to the calendar without needing to whip out the Skylight app. But there are probably plenty of people who are less lazy than I am who would be delighted to hear there's one less microphone-powered device in their home. My husband was certainly among them.

Overall, I liked this device a lot more than I expected, and I think the Calendar 2 is the most ideal size Skylight has made yet. The 15-inch screen fits nicely on my kitchen counter and has been convenient to reach for without taking up a ton of space. It's just big enough to see four days at a time, and they could have even gone a little larger and I'd still be happy with it. The larger Calendar Max is a nice size if you have the wall space for it, but I think the Calendar 2's price and size are a better fit for more families.