Skylight’s Calendar 2 Review: Its Best Digital Calendar Yet | WIRED

$279 at Skylight (With Plus Plan)

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Rating:7/10

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WIRED

Easily syncs to your existing calendars. Convenient and fun to use. The 15-inch screen is a good size for countertops. Photo screen saver delighted my whole family.

TIRED

Some features are behind a paywall. No voice input on the device itself (might be a pro for others).

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 today 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