Skylight Calendar Max Review

Design and Installation

• Portrait or landscape mode
• Has to be wall mounted
• 27-inch screen

With its 27-inch screen, the Skylight Calendar Max is a big device, made even bigger by its chunky bezels. That’s a lot bigger than your average smart display, including the Amazon Echo Show 21.

Unlike the smaller products in the Skylight Calendar lineup, the Max is built to be wall-mounted and doesn’t include a desktop mount in the box.

You can mount it in portrait or landscape modes. There’s not particularly an advantage in either way and, as the display doesn’t have any streaming services built in, you don’t particularly need it in landscape mode for watching video.

A simple mount is provided in the box, along with wall anchors and screws. Neatly, the mount has a built-in spirit level, so it’s easy to get it lined up straight.

Once in place, the screen needs the power supply connecting, and then it hangs onto the screen’s built-in hooks.

Then, I just needed to add the magnetic frame edges, which give the screen a neat finish, almost like a picture frame.

By default, the screen is on permanently, but you can schedule sleep mode to turn the screen off to save money, and you can manually enter sleep mode at any point.

Once powered on, the screen shows a unique code, which you need to link to the app and email address that you create. All-in-all, it takes a few minutes from set-up to having the device ready to go in the app. 

Features and performance

• Sidekick requires a subscription
• Links with external calendars
• Too-do list

As you can probably tell from the name, the Skylight Calendar Max is a calendar first and foremost. Its main screen shows a large calendar view, which you can organise by month, day, week or schedule (three days).

As the 27-inch screen is so big and has a 2560×1440 resolution, it’s easy to see what’s going on, even with the month view. That’s a step up from most smart displays or devices, where month views tend to get confusing, and it’s impossible to read any particular event entry.

As a calendar for the family, the Skylight Calendar Max supports multiple profiles, and each person in the family can have their own colour assigned.

Again, the large screen makes it easy to see who’s got what coming up, with individually coloured events cleanly displayed. Of course, you can filter events by person, so you can see what each person has coming up.

From the screen, it’s easy to add a new event, give it a date and time, and select which profile or profiles it should be assigned to. 

I love this basic functionality, as the Skylight Calendar Max makes it very easy to keep abreast of everything that’s coming up. But, so far, what I’ve mentioned is the built-in calendar system, so what happens if you’ve got external calendars that you already use?

Using the smartphone app, you can sync existing calendars to the Skylight Calendar Max. I added my Exchange accounts (one for home and one for work). Each calendar I added came in as a fresh profile.

That’s fine in principle, but I’d like to be able to add a calendar to an existing profile, to keep things simple.

There’s also one drawback: two-way sync is only supported with Google accounts. As I was using Exchange/Outlook accounts, any appointments I created on the Skylight Calendar Max stayed there and weren’t synchronised back.

That’s frustrating, as I sometimes found it quicker to add an appointment to the Skylight Calendar Max, but had to stop doing that, as my original calendar became out of sync. This seems like quite the oversight, given that this is a calendar device, and two-way synchronisation shouldn’t be that difficult.

In addition to the calendar, the Skylight Calendar Max also supports tasks and chores. They work as you’d expect, but are quite handy ways of keeping on top of the jobs that need doing around the house and, crucially, who’s responsible for them.

As well as using the screen, you can also use the Skylight app to view your calendar, and manage appointments and tasks. However, even appointments created in the app won’t sync out to an external calendar, so either use Skylight for everything or keep your personal stuff here and keep a separate calendar for work events.

One of things that Skylight promises is a simple way of importing calendars via Sidekick. This service costs £6 a month to use and there’s no free trial. Given how expensive the Skylight Calendar Max is, I’d have expected at least a month’s free trial, if not three.

Sidekick is designed to automatically add appointments via photo you take on your phone, or by uploading or emailing an image or document your screen’s email address. I didn’t have much luck with the email method.

I sent a Word document containing my daughter’s Duke of Edinburgh schedule to my device’s email address and never got a reply of any kind, and no dates were added.

Using my phone I uploaded an image of the document, and this worked much better. Reading through the text, Sidekick pulled out the relevant dates and information and added them to my calendar. That’s impressive and a nice time saver. Is it worth £6 a month? Only if you have to manually enter a lot of information.

Your subscription also includes a meal planner, but it does feel more like something that’s be put there to make the subscription seem like better value. 

Subscriptions also enable Rewards, which let you assign stars when tasks are completed, as a way to gives an incentive for doing their chores. Again, it’s fun, has a point, but I’m not sure I’d pay £6 a month for it.

Other than these features, the Skylight Calendar Max doesn’t do anything else. Unlike an Echo Show you can’t watch video, browse the web, control smart devices or get voice replies to queries.

That makes the Skylight Calendar Max far more limited, although its clear focus and simple interface do, at least, make it very easy to use.

Should you buy it?