Somewhere between the third missed dentist appointment and the fourth time I said “wait, that’s TODAY?” I accepted that my brain is not a reliable scheduling system. I’ve tried the whiteboard on the fridge. I’ve tried sticky notes. I’ve tried just being better at checking my phone, which lasted about four days before I forgot about that too. The whiteboard became a grocery list that nobody updated. The sticky notes migrated to the junk drawer. And my phone calendar works fine for me personally but it does absolutely nothing for everyone else in the house who isn’t me and isn’t checking my phone.
So when a company reached out and asked if I’d review their touchscreen digital family calendar I said sure. I wasn’t expecting much. A screen on a wall that tells me what day it is, basically. Maybe something the kids would poke at for a week and then ignore.
It turned out to be more than that.
The product is the Dragon Touch Digital Calendar (you can find it here), and the pitch is basically this: one shared screen on the wall, everybody’s schedules in the same place, no more “I didn’t know about that.” Which sounds almost too simple. But simple is exactly what makes it work.
Setup took maybe twenty minutes and seriously, that includes me reading the guide twice because I didn’t believe it was actually that straightforward. It comes with everything you need, mounting hardware included. Two screws in the wall, hang it up, connect to wifi and you’re most of the way there. Then it syncs with Google Calendar, or other popular calendar apps. I use Google so whatever I already had in there just showed up on the screen. All of it. Didn’t have to re-enter a single thing, which was honestly my biggest fear going in because I was not going to manually rebuild six peoples schedules from scratch.
There’s also their own app which is where a lot of the real day to day management happens. You can add things directly in there without touching the wall screen at all, which sounds like a small thing but when you’re standing in a grocery store and need to update the shopping list it actually matters quite a bit. Everything just syncs up in the background without you thinking about it.
The chore system lets you assign tasks to kids with star rewards for completing them. That is either going to be the most useful feature in this whole thing or completely irrelevant depending on your house and your kids. For us it works. Even if my kids are a lot older. The rewards become more interesting. But if you have young kids, who responds really well to a visible reward system, this feature alone might be worth the price. There’s also a shopping list, general reminders, all that. Fine, useful, does what it says.
But the meal planner is the thing I didn’t see coming. You know that question, “what’s for dinner?” It shows up every single day without fail. Same time, same energy, same person getting asked while they’re already trying to decompress from work. It’s not a big deal on its own but it adds up and honestly by Thursday I’m just tired of thinking about it. Having the week mapped out on the wall means nobody asks anymore. They just look. That’s it. That’s the whole thing and somehow it actually works. I don’t know why it took this long for someone to build this into a product but here we are.
Oh and when nobody’s using it, it runs as a photo frame. Just cycles through your pictures quietly in the background. I thought that would be kind of gimmicky but it’s not, it actually makes the thing feel less like a piece of tech you stapled to your wall and more like it belongs there. My husband noticed it before I even mentioned it. That’s probably the better endorsement.
Now, one thing I genuinely wish it could do: casting. I got the 27 inch version and I would love to be able to throw content to it from my phone the way you can with a Chromecast or any smart TV. Show a recipe on the big screen while you’re cooking. Pull up a photo. Share something quick with whoever’s standing in the kitchen. The screen is right there on the wall and it just makes total sense as a target for that kind of thing. But it doesn’t do that, at least not as far as I can tell. It does the calendar thing and that’s where it stops. I understand that’s probably a deliberate choice and I’m not saying it ruins the product because it doesn’t. I just keep thinking about how useful that would be and then remembering it’s not an option and being mildly annoyed all over again. Seems like a missed opportunity.
Would I buy this if nobody sent it to me? Yeah, I think I would. It fixed a real problem without asking everyone in the house to change how they do things or download yet another app they’ll forget about. Most tech wants you to adapt to it. This one just fit in.
Go check it out for yourself. Worst case it’s a really expensive photo frame. Best case you stop missing things.
About the Author
