Ever since the days of the Palm devices, developers have been coming up with better versions of the applications (‘apps’, as we call them these days) which are native to the devices. Many moons ago I remember acquiring a calendar app that was better than the one supplied with the Palm OS. Times have not changed. The native calendar app on Windows Phone is fine, it does all that it should… or does it? A quick search in the Windows Phone app store reveals many alternatives. I’ve tried a few and come to the conclusion that Super Calendar is the pick of the bunch (but an honourable mention should go to Simple Calendar).
What’s so great about Super Calendar? One feature plays to an important aspect of Windows Phone, that being the live tiles – Super Calendar displays your upcoming appointments on a live tile (two sizes available) and the tile flips to show more appointments. Personalisation is an important aspect for many people, so you can select a background image or stick to a plain background.
The app also has an option to display appointments on the lock screen (and to choose the image, and the style of the appointment layout), so you can see what’s coming up without even unlocking the phone – some people may not like this idea and consider it insecure, so it is an option that is turned off by default.
Inside the app there’s more personalisation options – a choice of background image (including the daily Bing wallpaper, which does seem to be tied to the US) – and colours for your calendars. I have my work calendar set to blue and the Arsenal fixtures set to red.
There are four basic calendar sections – day, week, month and agenda – but within each of these there are choices for the style. There are five different week views, six different month views, and a choice of the number of months to show on the agenda view. Also, the days and weeks can be viewed as a calendar grid.
Finally, another nice feature is the ability to pin a particular appointment to the phone’s start screen, and this will appear complete with the background image that you can assign to the appointment. Oh, and I’ve just found one more thing – clicking on an appointment’s location will show the place on the map (assuming the phone can understand the location information). I just clicked on ‘Emirates Stadium’ and the hallowed ground was displayed.
Super Calendar will cost you the princely sum of £1.99 and in my opinion is well worth the money.
