The Calendar App

Calendar App

The Calendar on your Android phone is a pretty simple app, but it definitely gets the job done. It shows your upcoming events, pulled in from your Google accounts, corporate Exchange server, Facebook, and any other services you've set up on your phone that offer regular events. It can also ring, vibrate, or drop a notification ping on your phone exactly as far ahead of an event as you'd like.

As noted, you set up your calendar accounts in the Accounts section of your phone's settings. To check out the calendar app itself, you can click the Calendar shortcut in your App Tray, but if you're a regular calendar checker (and aren't we all, these days?), you'll probably want to create a widget on your home screen to get a quick read and fast access. Press and hold on an empty space on your home screen, select the Widgets option, then select a Calendar widget.

Nexus Calendar Widget

The standard Android Calendar widget is a square that takes up four empty app spaces on your home screen. HTC and Motorola phones have their own customized Calendar widgets. HTC's widget includes three different size options: a single-row widget that just lists your next upcoming appointment, then two full-page widgets, in monthly grid or vertical agenda views, that pop up with information when clicked.

HTC Calendar Widget

Motorola Droid phones offer what this author considers the best Calendar widget around: a widget that lets you set a custom size, as well as which of your calendars are shown on that widget.

Motorola Calendar Widget

If none of those have exactly what you're looking for, open up the Market and search for “calendar widget.” There are tons of widgets, free and paid, available with all kinds of looks, sizes, and features.

Using the Calendar

Despite their different looks and custom widgets, most Calendar apps on Android phones work the same. After opening the Calendar app, you'll see a view of your events, perhaps in the “Month” view:

Month View on Nexus

The Month view is a good way to see how generally busy a bit of time will be. To head forward and back in months, you swipe your screen up or down. This view doesn't really provide details until you click on a particular date, though. Let's change the view to something more detailed, shall we? Hit your Menu button.

Calendar Menu Options

Look at that! Four whole other views on just how many ways you're going to miss out on a leisurely day in the park in the near future … and (ahem) a familiar More sub-menu.

Week provides a nice balance between fine-grain, hour-by-hour detail and a larger overview of what's coming up.

Events in a Week Period

Events that are happening all week, or run for an entire day (or that you forgot to specify a time for) are listed at the top, and you tap on any item to get its details. To advance or go back a week, you swipe the screen left or right.

The Today and Day views are helpful when you've got a really crazy schedule, whether today or always. Each shows a vertical, hour-by-hour view of what's going on, and you slide between days by swiping left or right. The only difference is that Today brings you right to a vertical view of today's date, while you'd press Day if you were looking ahead in a Month or Week view and wanted to get a closer look at a particular day.

1 Day View

If you long-press on any day in a Calendar view, you get options to View, Edit, or Delete that event, along with an incongruous “New Event” option. Selecting “View,” or tapping any event on your calendar, brings up a look at what's happening.

Long Press an Event to See Details

Everything you've entered in about the event, or that was automatically pulled from a server, is right here. The standard time, date, and place are there, too, but notice the location listing that looks like a link. It is a link, actually—click it, and if you've entered in a proper address, it will pull up in Maps, where you can then easily get directions or turn-by-turn Navigation to that spot.

You can change your attendance status here, see who you've invited is confirmed as attending, contact those people by pressing their user icon, and, most helpfully, change, add, and remove reminders. The reminders you add and change are right on your phone. They will pop up in your Notifications Bar, at a minimum, but can also activate a ringtone, vibrate, and blink your notification light, if you'd like.

Need to change something, or want to create something new on your calendar? Hit the Menu button and click the New or Edit event options, or long-press on any event in your calendar.

Editing an Event

This stuff is pretty self-explanatory, but it's worth noting that when you make a change to anything here, be sure to scroll all the way to the bottom and press the “Done” button, or else your changes won't be saved. If you made a mistake when editing, you can hit the “Revert” button right next to “Done.” If you want to change your status as busy/available for that event, or make an event viewable by anybody, hit the Menu button and choose “Show Extra Options.”

Managing Calendars

You set up your calendar-syncing accounts during your phone setup, as well as in the Accounts section of your Settings. If you want to change how those calendars are displayed, or change their syncing status, hit the Menu button from the main Calendar display, tap the More sub-menu, then choose “Calendars.”

Calendar Syncing and Display Options

All your calendar-capable accounts are listed, so click on any account that you want to manage. In Android 2.2 and beyond, calendar options have been simplified significantly from previous versions. There's a button on the right side of each calendar listed under each account. Press it to change between one of three settings: not synced or visible, synced but not visible, or synced and visible.

Why would you want to sync a calendar but not have it be shown on your widgets or calendar views? Some calendars are just overwhelming with the events on them, or redundant with other calendars you have showing, so you might want to take them off your main view. Keeping them synced, however, still lets you add events to those calendars from your Android, so others subscribed to the calendars can see them, and you can still search back through them.

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