This is a review of Reminders, a productivity application from SBSH.
Review Conditions
Reminders v1.1 from SBSH was installed on a Nokia E71, an S60 3rd edition FP1 device.
Installation
Reminders comes as a .SIS file and can be installed using the Nokia PC Suite.
First View
Having used Handy Clock for a long time, I was curious to see how SBSH’s Reminders would measure up. I have been fully dependent on Handy Clock for all my alarms until now. I decided to switch to Reminders for a few weeks during the review to find out if it can be my primary alarm application.
Main Review
Reminders is a smart alarm application. Alarms can be created locally on the application. Appointments in the S60 calendar are also copied to Reminders. So you get an integrated single view of all alarms. Local alarms are differentiated from Calendar alarms by the icon of the alarm. All the data from the Calendar is faithfully copied to Reminders. So if the reminder for an appointment in the Calendar is 15 minutes earlier, the alarm in Reminder is for the reminder time and not the actual start of the appointment.
But there is more to Reminders than just alarm integration.
Smart Actions
All Reminders are smart. For every reminder, there are some smart actions that can be performed. You can attach a contact, Launch an application or change the profile when the alarm goes off. The contact or the application can be opened from within Reminders. Unfortunately, the smart action of changing a profile only works with local alarms and not for the appointments imported from S60 calendar. A additional icon on the right indicates different smart actions specified for the alarms.
In the image above the smart action to attach a Contact in Reminders is seen. The contact can be called directly when the alarm goes off.
The image above shows the smart action to attach the Active Notes application in Reminders.
The smart action to change to Silent profile at the time of the alarm is seen in the above image.
There are several other smart configurations for each alarm. You can also choose different ring sounds for each Reminder and of any type, i.e. mp3, aac, etc. The volume type can be configured to to be of fixed or ascending type. The alarm can be made to repeat several times with the default being 3. The ring sound will not go on indefinitely but will stop after a few seconds. It will resume again after a gap.
Master Setting
A master setting is available where the ring sound length, ring sound gap, default sound, volume and repeat times can be set for all alarms. The common setting can be set differently for Calendar alarms and local alarms too.
Snooze
The alarms can be snoozed for 3mts, 5mts, 10mts, 15mts, 30mts, 1h, 2hr, 4hr, 8hr, 12h, 1 day and 2 days. Once the alarm is snoozed, the alarm icon has a “Z” on top of it, to indicate that you have snoozed it.
In the main alarm screen, there are 4 tabs, for various alarm status – upcoming alarms, snoozed alarms, completed and missed alarms.
Alarms can be edited, obviously. Alarms that are missed or completed can be reopened and changed. Meeting appointments imported from the Calendar may have lot of text. To be able to read them within Reminders, a scroll bar is provided in each Alarm. The text can also be zoomed in and out. Recurring alarms can be set, for weekends, workdays or specific days of the week.
A lot of though has gone into designing the application and considering all the scenarios of usage. This greatly enhances the usability of the application.
Handling
Usability of Reminders was never an issue. The user interface and options are intuitive and very well designed. I didn’t like the fact that the alarms won’t work if the application is closed. To its credit, there is a configuration option to auto start the application, but I still believe that it should raise alarms even when the application is closed.
Weaknesses
The application needs to be opened all the time for the alarms to work. If you close the application, you won’t get the alarms. This really must be changed. Handy Clock doesn’t need to be opened at all.
The smart action of Changing profiles does not work for appointments imported from the S60 calendar. This is an opportunity for true integration of the Calendar with Reminders.
<update on 22nd March 09>There should be an option to disable alarms and enable them for later use. There are days when I don’t want to wake up so early but the only option I have is to delete the alarm. Later on, I have to create the recurring alarm again with all the unique settings that I used long time back.
Conclusion
The initial version 1.0 was neither stable nor reliable and I wrote a note the the folks at SBSH. They released version 1.1 in short time and it turned out to be a great improvement over the first version. I have been using the new version for a week or so now and I don’t miss Handy Clock for my alarms. Reminders is simply for alarms only and it does that specific job very well. Its would give it a 4 of 5. It can be downloaded here.
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“Handy Clock doesn’t need to be opened at all.”
– Actually, it does, you just can’t see it. When installed it launches a background service process that auto-starts and can not be controlled from w/in the app. IIRC, it uses over 500 k of RAM even with 0 alarms setup. Handy Blacklist uses a very similar background process that stays running even when you have the app disabled. These background process are what moved me away from the Handy apps to alternatives. Apps that always has to running with an icon are much better than apps that install background services without asking or telling you. Don’t get me started on Nokia Messaging either…
Hi Scynn,
Sure, I see your point. I wouldn’t want all apps to disable control by the user and run in the background. But some apps like Reminders do need to run always, without having the user to check if he/she has closed it inadvertantly.