Skylight Digital Calendar: The Pros, The Cons, And Is It Worth Your Money?

The Skylight Calendar is a digital device that lets you update and manage your family's schedule, to-do lists, and meal plans. And that's it. That's all it does. You can't stream Netflix on it or play Angry Birds. You can't even browse the internet. This limited functionality is its main selling point. You place this calendar in your kitchen (or wherever else your family is likely to congregate), and everyone knows what they're doing and when. While plenty of apps can manage your calendar for you, you do need to remember to check them. Not so the Skylight Calendar, which is a hefty bit of kit that you can't help but notice. The Skylight Calendar I tested is a pretty sizeable 15 inches, and there's also a bigger version available — the Cal Max — with a whopping 27-inch screen. There's a small 10-inch version as well if you want something a bit more discreet.

The Skylight Calendar works like a whiteboard or paper calendar, and you can add plans simply by tapping the screen. You can also access it from an app on your phone so you can check and update it when you're not standing next to it. Does it work well enough to justify bringing another gadget into your (presumably already gadget-rich) home? And most importantly, is it worth the $159.99 to $678.99 price tag? To find out, I took the Skylight Calendar for a test drive.

The Skylight Calendar has a couple of extra non-calendar tools, including a chores schedule and grocery list feature. However, the calendar is the main attraction. You can set it to display the current day, week, or month or choose the schedule option, which shows hourly time boxes. To add an event using the calendar, press the + key or hold down the screen on the relevant day or time. It gives you the option to add an Event or Dinner plan every time, which is a bit annoying if you're only ever going to be adding events. This goes away if you sign up for the Plus plan, though. 

In the new event window, you can give it a name (including emojis if you're feeling whimsical), set the start and finish time, and set it to a recurring event if needed. It's easy to delete or edit events by tapping on them and then making the relevant changes or selecting Delete Event. You can also add events via the Skylight app, which you'll need to download when you set up the account anyway. Certain features, like adding profiles for each family member, only work on the app, but for the most part, it provides the same features as the physical calendar.

If you sign up for Calendar Plus, you have access to a bunch of extra features. For example, the chores list comes as standard, but with Plus, you can incorporate a rewards system. I used bribery as a primary motivator when my daughter was little, so I imagine this would be useful if you have children who are prepared to unload the dishwasher ten times if you promised them a comic.

You can also set up a photo screensaver. While it's nice being able to display a picture of my cat on my calendar — and the quality is excellent, as you would expect from a company whose other main products are digital photo frames — I can't help feeling it runs contrary to the main advantage of the Skylight Calendar. You should be able to see your appointments at a glance. I don't want my partner looking at pictures of cats; I want them to remember to pick the kids up. 

The Plus plan gives you access to the full Meal Planner feature. You can ask the app to provide meal suggestions to suit your dietary requirements and add ingredients to your grocery list with one click. Having never planned a meal in my life (doesn't everyone just see what needs to be used up first in the fridge and wing it from there?), this feature was somewhat wasted on me. However, I can see that if you're the kind of person who plans ahead (or you share cooking duties with someone else in the household), there's plenty to get your teeth into here.

The best Plus feature is easily the Sidekick import function. Skylight Calendar's Sidekick lets you import events, recipes, and lists from a range of sources, including photos and PDFs. For example, any emails you receive containing dates that need to be added to your calendar can be forwarded to a special @skylight.com email address that you'll create during set-up. Skylight does an impressive job finding the relevant name, date, and time of the event and adding it to your calendar, and sends you an email to let you know when it's done so you can check that the details are correct. I found that it accurately spotted all the pertinent details from the emails I sent it. Disappointingly, when I sent it emails without dates to see what it would do, it just ignored them. I'd have appreciated an email saying that it couldn't find anything.

It can also extract information from images. I tested this by sending party invitations as PDFs and PNGs. I even wrote an appointment by hand, photographed it with my phone, and sent that. It dealt with all these formats flawlessly. You can import recipes directly from websites or scan recipe books to include in the meal plan feature. This feature can be done from within the phone app and doesn't even require you to send an email. You can even talk to it and let it compile calendar events and to-do lists from your voice message.

Sidekick is the most impressive feature of the Plus plan. By removing the possibility of things getting lost or forgotten before you have the chance to add them to the calendar, it makes staying organized a lot easier.

The Skylight Calendar has all the advantages of a paper calendar, but you can still access it from your phone to check and update when you're not standing in the kitchen. It really is the best of both worlds. It would be very handy for busy parents who need to organize multiple appointments, social events, and after-school activities. Giving access to everyone should make it easier for couples to share the mental load. You don't need to have one default parent keeping track of all the kids' activities when it can be sent to the shared calendar in seconds. (70% of the mental load is still shouldered by women, so, yes, I'm basically saying that the Skylight Calendar is good for feminism.)

I was really impressed with how well the import features worked, too, although those are only available if you pony up for the Plus plan. Its narrow focus is also a plus; you can't get distracted when using it because no alerts are popping up to let you know that someone's commented on your Instagram post or that it's your turn on Words with Friends (though this is still an issue with the phone app, of course). 

The Skylight Calendar comes with everything you need right out of the box, including free-standing and wall mounts, as well as the screws you need to attach them. Its boxy shape means that it'll happily sit on a table or shelf without a stand, but it's probably safer to do it properly.

The main drawback I found with the Skylight Calendar was that it wasn't always clear how to use it. The instruction booklet doesn't provide much information beyond the initial activation; presumably, the device is intended to be intuitive. However, I encountered an issue trying to add events where the calendar told me I needed to set up a profile first. I thought I'd already created my profile in the setup process, but it's actually a separate step. I finally figured it out (you need to select 'profiles' halfway down the Calendar features page on the app and add them there), but it would have been nice if this had been covered in the instruction booklet. It would have been even better if the calendar itself had provided instructions rather than just showing an error message.

I also encountered an issue syncing my calendars. The process was easy to do and almost instantaneous, so that side of it was excellent. However, I ended up with more profiles on my calendar than I wanted. You can sync your Skylight calendar with existing calendars like Google and Outlook; I synced two calendars that used two different email addresses, neither of which were the ones I used to set up the Skylight calendar. This created two new profiles and there didn't seem to be an obvious way to merge them all together.

There's also very little by way of customization available on the Skylight calendar. The display is attractive enough, but there's no option to change things like the colors, fonts, or layout.

The Skylight Calendar costs between $159.99 and $678.99, depending on the size of the screen and whether you purchase the Calendar Plus plan. The 10-inch screen costs $159.99, while the 15-inch screen costs $299.99. If you opt for the 27-inch Calendar Max, you can choose between a classic frame for $599.99 or the slightly more expensive shadow box frame for $629.99. Subscribing to Calendar Plus will cost you an additional $79 per year.

You can save money by purchasing the calendar and Plus at the same time, with a discount of $20- $30 on the cost of the device itself and one month of Plus for free. However, you'll need to renew at $70 per year once your trial month is up.

Obviously, it isn't cheap. Even with the savings, you're looking at $228.99 for the 10-inch and 358.99 for the 15-inch. Would it make more sense to purchase a cheap tablet and install a calendar app like Google or Cozi instead? There are also other paid calendar apps you can subscribe to. Buying a tablet rather than a calendar-specific device does have the advantage that you can repurpose it if you find you don't need a digital family calendar anymore. The Honor Pad V9, for example, has an 11.5-inch screen and costs around $260. Or you can buy a 10-inch Amazon Fire for $140.

Having tested the Skylight Calendar, I think this product is a better option than using a calendar application on a tablet, especially as inexpensive tablets tend to be fairly small in size. The 15-inch calendar makes it easy to see everything and the 27-inch option would give you even better visibility. The Skylight's frame and wall mounts mean that it is ready to go out of the box and will actually look nice displayed in your home.

Even if you opt for the standard version without Plus, the ease of use means that you're far more likely to use it than other organizational solutions that get abandoned when they become too much hassle to maintain. However, I think if you're going to use a Skylight Calendar, it's worth going all-in and signing up for Plus. The automatic import features are a game changer if you're trying to make organizing your week as simple and stress-free as possible.

This is a device that works best for large-ish households where more than one smartphone-owning adult is organizing things. The price of the Skylight Calendar would be worth it if it saves you a hefty amount of time spent on life admin. That said, if you're a single person simply trying to keep track of your doctor appointments and shopping lists, then this would probably be an unnecessarily expensive way to do it.