Skylight Calendar Review – Is It Worth It?

The Skylight Calendar is a digital calendar for your home. It includes features such as event planning and management, meal planning, to-do lists, chore charts, and more.

However, is it worth the hefty price? Today, I will be reviewing the Skylight Calendar.

I will share an in-depth overview of its features, capabilities, and pricing along with pros and cons of buying a Skylight Calendar.

Let’s get into it.

Skylight Calendar Overview

The Skylight Calendar is a digital calendar which you can hang on your wall or put on your countertop. It runs on a specialized software, and it’s designed to be an alternative to a traditional, physical calendar.

It offers greater convenience and better organization capabilities than a physical calendar. It’s basically a touchscreen device that comes with an accompanying mobile app.

Skylight allows all family members to share and contribute to the calendar, making things like tracking chores easy. It also syncs with various digital calendar software, such as Outlook, to help you organize your events in one central location, viewable from your kitchen or living room.

Let’s talk about the most important features and functionalities of the Skylight Calendar.

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Features

Wi-Fi Connectivity

The Skylight Calendar connects to Wi-Fi for updates. It only runs on Wi-Fi, so you will need an active Wi-Fi connection at home to use it properly.

This allows it to sync with the mobile app and connected third-party calendar apps.

Mobile App

The Skylight mobile app lets you control and manage your Skylight Calendar. It allows you to add or remove items from your grocery list, for example,

It also allows you to view your calendar from your phone. When you’re not home, you can simply open the app to view your upcoming events and chores.

In addition, using the app, you can do things like manage the color codes of the family members you have added to the calendar.

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Chore Chart and To-Do Lists

You can add all sorts of chore charts and to-do lists to the Skylight Calendar. A grocery list is just one type of list you can add; it allows whoever is going shopping to ensure they pick up everything the household needs.

Remember, you can view the grocery list on the mobile app as well.

You can also add to-do lists for certain upcoming events. For example, if you are planning a birthday party, you can add a to-do list of all things needed to prepare for the party.

You can also create chore charts for different family members for different days. For example, you might assign a list of chores for your teenage son to do on the weekend, including mowing the lawn and cleaning the garage.

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Event Management

The Skylight Calendar is great for event management, as you can sync calendars from multiple phones to view all of your family’s events, appointments, and more from one central device.

There are many ways to add events. You can sync automatically with various third-party calendar apps and software, including Google, Outlook, Yahoo, Apple, and Cozi.

When an event is added to a synced calendar, it will be added to your Skylight Calendar as well.

This has many helpful use cases. For example, if you get a meeting invite for a virtual meeting via Google Meet, Gmail will give you the option to add it to your Google Calendar with the click of a button.

Once you do that, it will be synced to your Skylight Calendar as well, as long as it has been connected to your Google account. Then, you will be able to view it every day in your living room, ensuring you never lose track of your daily tasks and appointments.

With Magic Import (only available to Plus subscribers), there is an even easier way to add events to your calendar. Let’s say you get an email from your daughter’s school about an event.

Simply forward the email to a specialized email address connected to your Skylight Calendar, and the event will be added to your Skylight Calendar automatically. You can forward PDFs as well, not just emails.

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Meal Planning

Another useful feature of the Skylight Calendar is meal planning. You can make a meal plan for what your family will have for lunch, dinner, and other meals throughout the week.

This can help people prepare, whether through grocery shopping, ordering from Uber Eats, or cooking. It saves a lot of stress and back-and-forth arguing about what you should eat for dinner.

Touchscreen Interface

The touchscreen interface makes the Skylight easy to use. In addition to the mobile app, you can add events, dinner plans, and chores directly from the touchscreen interface.

The UX is great, intuitive, and easy to navigate, and there is no substantial learning curve involved.

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Weather Forecasts

The Skylight Calendar offers more than just a simple weather forecast. It customizes the weather forecast based on your upcoming events and appointments.

For example, let’s say you live in Albany but have an event in New York City or vice versa. You’re not sure what the weather will be like there; should you take a jacket? Will it be cold?

Should you be aware of a possible blizzard in the area that might cause you to get stuck there overnight?

The Skylight Calendar will give you precise weather forecasts for the date and location of your events. That way, you will always be prepared for any kind of inclement weather.

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Family Sharing

You can add multiple family members to your Skylight Calendar. Color coding helps organize different family members.

Everyone can be assigned a unique color, which will help them easily locate their tasks and events.

Sleep Mode

You can set your Skylight Calendar to go to sleep at a specific time each night and wake up at a specific time each morning.

Let’s say you wake up at 6 AM. Simply set your calendar to wake up at 6 AM as well to conserve energy throughout the night.

Photo Screensaver

If you subscribe to the Plus plan, you can add a photo screensaver to the Skylight Calendar. When not using the calendar, it goes into screensaver mode and displays your personal photos, which you can upload in the accompanying mobile app.

That way, the Skylight can serve as both a calendar and photo frame.

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Skylight Calendar Pros

Multiple Sizes and Options Available

The Skylight Calendar is available both as a counter stand display (which you can place on your kitchen counter) and as a wall-mounted display.

The counter stand calendar frame is available in 10- and 15-inch options, while the wall-mounted frame is available in both 15- and 27-inch options.

You Can Sync Multiple Skylight Calendars

You can purchase more than one Skylight calendar and sync them with each other. If you have a large house, this is very useful.

For example, you can have a wall-mounted calendar in your bedroom or home office and a counter stand calendar in your kitchen. That way, you can keep track of your tasks from wherever you are.

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120-Day Refund Policy

Skylight has one of the most generous refund policies I’ve seen, with a lengthy 120-day policy. If you purchased the Skylight Calendar directly from the Skylight website, you can take advantage of the 100% satisfaction guaranteed return policy within 120 days of your purchase.

Not only that, but return shipping will be paid for by Skylight. Simply print out the return label and attach it to your shipment.

See the full refund policy here.

Skylight Calendar Cons

Requires Internet Connectivity

Unfortunately, the Skylight Calendar requires Wi-Fi connectivity to work.

You would think that if you’re paying such a high price for a digital frame that can pretty much only be used as a calendar, there would at least be an offline mode.

An offline mode, just for clarity, would mean the calendar would work without connecting the display to a Wi-Fi network. You would manually input events and chores from the touchscreen interface without any syncing capabilities.

However, the Skylight Calendar requires the internet at all times to work, which is a serious disadvantage.

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No Web Access

Even though the Skylight Calendar requires an internet connection, it can’t connect to the web. There is no browser or support for other apps in the proprietary software it uses.

Just for clarification, the internet and the World Wide Web are two different things. The World Wide Web is anything you can access in a web browser, while the internet is a network of interconnected computers through which you can access the World Wide Web and other services.

Although the Skylight Calendar must be connected to a Wi-Fi network to work, it can’t browse the web or social media. It can’t play games or music, which is another serious disadvantage, as there are many tablets and displays that do allow you to do so.

For example, the Eco Show 15 from Amazon not only has shared calendar, to-do lists, and sticky note widgets but also Fire TV support as well as support for third-party streaming services such as Netflix.

You can play music, control your smart home devices, and more. Not only that, but it is also compatible with the Alexa Voice Remote control.

The Skylight Calendar is pricier than The Echo Show 15 (for the same size) and has none of that.

Requires a Subscription for Some Features

Once you buy the hardware, you can use the calendar and most features for free, without ever paying a subscription. However, some useful features are only available with a yearly subscription.

And, since the hardware is locked into the Skylight software, you will be paying this subscription for life if you want those premium features.

These premium features include the ability to add events by forwarding emails or PDFs to a special email address and the ability to upload photos to be used as a screensaver.

If you are fine without displaying photos or sending events by email to be added to the calendar, you can still use the Skylight Calendar for free.

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No Battery Power Backup

Another problem with the Skylight Calendar is that it must be plugged into a wall outlet to work. This will limit where it can be placed, since it will need to be near a power outlet.

If you use Mango Display, on the other hand, on an Android tablet, you will be able to use it without it being connected to a power source. You will just need to recharge the tablet when the battery is low.

How Much Does the Skylight Calendar Cost?

The Skylight Calendar itself comes in four versions:

• The 10-inch frame is $159.99.
• The 15-inch frame is $299.99.
• The 27-inch plastic frame is $599.99.
• The 27-inch aluminum frame is $629.99.

The Plus subscription, which allows you to send events via email and upload photos to the frame to be used as a screensaver, costs $39/year.

However, if you purchase the Plus subscription together with the hardware (with the 10- or 15-inch version), you will get a $10 discount on the hardware as well as one month of Plus free.

Since pricing is subject to change, check the pricing page for updated pricing information.

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Conclusion: Is the Skylight Calendar Worth It?

The Skylight Calendar is not a bad product, but it’s a bit overpriced, in my opinion, and not worth the money. For the amount it costs, it offers very limited functionality.

While I understand the idea behind it, which is to offer a calendar without any distractions, there should at least be an option to stream music. Besides, it has some serious cons, such as requiring an internet connection to work while not offering any web access and requiring continuous access to a power source.