Manage your life through Google’s own calendar app

Google Calendar is a cloud-synced calendar app that was originally only part of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich but now is a standalone app.

Adding and editing events is a breeze

The app opens in schedule view as default, which shows a variable time period depending on how many entries you have in your calendar. You can also chose day view or five-day view, but not week view or month view. Although there is a drop down menu that will temporarily show you the days you have events on in the month, but not the details of these events.

When you add an event in Google Calendar, you can invite your phone contacts, add a location, change the timezone, set it as a repetitive event, add a note, and change the color. Then you can email all your attendees you’ve invited with a message about the event.

Google Calendar integrates with Gmail so it will add events automatically from your email, for example flights you have booked, and then send updates if this flight has been delayed (if you receive an email telling you about it). It doesn’t integrate with Facebook or your Outlook account so you will need to add birthdays manually.

It also gives you cute pictures to accompany your calendar entries. For example, lunch had a picture of a table with plates and cutlery. And December had snow and skiing.

Sleek and slick

Google Calendar now sports the new Material Design of Android Lollipop and it looks slick, colorful and far more visual. Adding an event is very easy, with a big red button in the bottom right corner to help you get there and autocomplete filling in places and people when you stop typing.

The schedule view is a big improvement and makes Google Calendar far more user friendly, but only being able to set it to show a maximum of five days is a bit annoying.

Still lacking some features

Google Calendar certainly looks the part and it’s got lots of useful features, such as adding contacts to your events and automatically inputting your events from Gmail. It still isn’t the best calendar up in terms of managing your life and being productive, but it’s getting there.