22 Days HD Review

22 Days HD looks beautiful. Offering a clean and attractive interface, it looks like the kind of app that users would be happy to have displayed on their fridge with the iPad Smart Cover or in some other very obvious location. Underneath that stylish exterior however, there's not much to see. A clear sign of style over substance indeed.

It's a reminder app and one that at first seems to do everything just right. Users can set as many events as they want, they can arrange recurring events, link contacts to birthdays, add an image either from the app's attractive library or the iPad camera roll. They can even get the app to recommend a list of popular public holidays according to their geographic location. As the user gets more involved with the app however, the more apparent the issues become.

There's no way of arranging events according to type. This can make for an increasingly cluttered view. For instance, there's no way of just checking birthdays or just checking work related dates. Things that would be great to divide up in some way. It's handy to be able to consult all the dates at once sometimes (such as to avoid clashes) but the option to look at categories individually would have been hugely useful. There's also no way of checking what day of the week an event is with the date being the only option offered. In the case of birthdays, there's also no way of entering the age of the person for that birthday - something that's often useful especially when it's a big event (such as a 40th/50th etc). Finally, there's no way of syncing dates elsewhere such as with Google Calendar. The only way of sharing content is via Twitter or Facebook.

It's unfortunate that 22 Days HD lacks so many useful features as it is a very visually attractive app. Without such features however, it's a hard one to sell to anyone other than those looking for great looks over practicality. Maybe with an update or two, this could be an easier app to recommend.