Skylight’s Calendar 2 Review: Its Best Digital Calendar Yet
Your calendars are the default page that Calendar 2 shows you, but that’s not all this device can do. There are several tabs you can click: Lists, Tasks, Rewards, Meals, Recipes and Photos, then Sleep and Settings. Besides Sleep and Settings, both of which relate to different settings on your device, these pages will need 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 per year or $8 per month, to access rewards, meals, and Skylight’s in-app AI tool, Sidekick.
Photography: Nena Farrell
It’s easy to start using Meals to plan your meals for the week, but if you like many homemade recipes, you can add them manually to the Recipes tab. Why bother adding an entire recipe? Because then when you add this recipe to your meal list for the week, the Skylight will ask you if it should also add the ingredients to your grocery list in the Lists tab. I didn’t like that every time I manually added one of my recipes it asked if I wanted to add the ingredients to my shopping list, but it’s a reasonable flow of actions and might be more useful if I converted to Skylight being my only shopping list.
I really like the visual look of my family calendar and 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 attribute 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 of the same pages you see on the device. However, Calendar 2 doesn’t seem to remember the quick meals I write in; I should save them in Recipes to use them continually or mark them as a repeating meal on a specific day. I also like that if there is an event on both my husband’s calendar and mine, the Skylight will only show it once on the screen and set both colors for our calendars to indicate that it is a shared event.
The Tasks page also works great if you want a list of tasks for each family member, but even for tasks where I set a certain time for, I didn’t see any alerts on the device or on my phone. Once I opened the Tasks page, I could see that I was two days late for “Bring Form to Dentist Appointment”, but I think those pages would be easy to ignore. This is something you should make a habit of and should not rely on for a timed task you would like to complete. Meanwhile, rewards are tied to tasks, allowing you to set the number of stars you need to earn from completing tasks to earn a reward that you set for yourself or other members of your household, like your children.
The paid garden
Photography: Nena Farrell
My biggest complaint with Skylight is its paywall. Its calendar devices require the Plus plan ($79 per month or $8 per year) to use all features, including the photo screensaver, which I think is a huge bonus for the device. Although Skylight isn’t my favorite digital photo frame and the 15-inch frame doesn’t have the perfect orientation for displaying photos, the screen saver option turns the device into a great multi-use display that the whole family can enjoy.
