this is what i need/am looking for:
- note taking on android, maybe PC too.
- easy to check them off, ability to set it to push notification about specific notes
- tied to a calendar
- voice to text capabilities. i need to be able to dictate a reminder on the go.
- preferably free but i would totally pay for these features. just not subscription model
Same deal with Microsoft To Do (formerly Wunderlist). It has Outlook integration, but ew. Outlook.
Can anyone weigh in on whether Obsidian is any good?
You mention note taking app in the title, which is what it looks like Obsidian is. But your second bullet is "easy to check them off", which isn't what most note-taking apps are designed around.
To-do list apps and note-taking apps are quite different. To-do lists should allow you to really quickly pull out your phone and create a task and set a date for it, note-taking apps usually have documents with an editor and they're not organized as simple tasks that go away when you're done. You're not gonna want to stand there and click through a bunch of stuff to make a simple task, and the same for completing it. So you should decide which one you want, although I'm sure there are apps that support a hybrid.