TouchBase Calendar Review

We all know there are a ton of different Calendar apps out there. Each vying for your attention but many offering an experience not unlike the built-in Calendar app that's already provided. However, a fair amount of thought seems to have been put into TouchBase Calendar with it offering a intelligent way of keeping track of appointments and an even more effective way of informing other attendees what's going on.

Linking up with the built-in calendar app, TouchBase Calendar retrieves all relevant appointments, saving the user time in adding entries themselves. The key selling point for TouchBase Calendar is the fact that it makes it so easy to communicate with relevant people to do with the meeting. A quick tap on the appointment and it's possible to retrieve map and direction details, the exact time of the meeting and crucially the means to communicate. It takes a little mastering to ensure that the right terms are added for the app to figure things out, but the tips section does a great job of explaining how to do this correctly.

TouchBase Calendar appreciates that for those users in a rush, they don't always want to take the time to enter a long SMS or email explaining why. Instead, a series of options are provided: SMS, Call and Email. Tapping on SMS or Email brings up the option to compose a personalized message to the contact but it also offers some predefined messages. Users have 1 touch functionality to let recipients know that they've just got there or that they're running late by 5 minutes, right up to 20 minutes or more. It's as simple as that but a great time saver.

The intelligence doesn't stop there though. The app figures out from event details who the appointment is with and where, thus offering that information via contact details or Google Maps without any need to manually input it. It's a neat touch and for those with weeks full of appointments, a valuable timesaver.

It's not all plain sailing. I found upon first loading the app that it kept crashing whenever I tried to enter my own contact details. There's a simple workaround for it by just tapping cancel and I do wonder if it's possibly due to my iPhone 4 still running iOS4.2 rather than iOS5.0.

That minor glitch aside and TouchBase Calendar is a great productivity app. It's simple to use with pretty much everything involving just one tap to implement making it ideal for people constantly on the move. For the business person dealing with many different appointments at once, it's a great replacement for the standard Calendar app.