Flava Review

Flava is an interesting amalgamation of social networking and journal keeping. Focused on providing a private space for the user to keep all their memories, it bundles in sharing facilities via Facebook and Twitter to ensure that users always have the option to show others what has been going on in their life.

Favoring a very white and clinical appearance, users can add mostly anything imaginable to their Flava journal. Photos, videos, audio clips, locations and links are all catered for here. More originally comes the inclusion of movie titles, books and song titles, each being able to invoke memories of a particularly iconic time in one's life. It's a neat touch given the power of such forms of media to remind us of good (or sometimes sad) times. A time and date can be added to each of these along with text to explain things. A mixture of different things can be combined, also, so that a memory can be fully fleshed out.

For instance, if you've been on a particularly great date with your partner, having seen a great movie, gone out dancing and ate a delicious meal, it's possible to add a reminder of each of those things all in one entry. It's a really nice idea, one that makes Flava stand out a little more from more conventional journal apps.

All the information is saved to the Flava Cloud, with users provided with 200mb of Cloud storage. There's no other form of backup, however, such as via iCloud or Dropbox which is unfortunate. I'd feel wary storing anything too precious on the Flava Cloud, just in case something happened. Flava is also not the most attractive of apps to use. Its clinical look juxtaposes awkwardly with the warm nature that such memories would evoke and I'd have appreciated the ability to theme my journal in some way. There's also no way of pin locking the app, something that is always valuable in such a potentially sensitive app.

These problems mean that Flava is a great idea but one that still needs some work doing to it. It's a great place to store a variety of memories but I'd have appreciated some more thought being placed on the practical side of using the app.