When apps are bundled with phones we tend not to look at the alternatives, especially when the bundled apps are quite good, but there may be better ones, such as PocketLife Calendar for iOS.

Apple Calendar is quite a good app for the iPhone that does its job quite well, but even so, you should consider the alternatives because some of them may suite you better.

PocketLife Calendar is exactly what the name suggests and it is a calendar you can carry in your pocket, on your iPhone that is.

I already had Apple Calendar set up and several calendars added to it and PocketLife Calendar just worked when it was installed. It read all the calendars and events in them so everything was there in the PocketLife app right from the start. The only configuration required was to select which calendars to display or hide and set the default calendar for new events.

Multiple calendar views

What immediately strikes you when first using the app is the large number of ways you can view calendars and appointments. The default view shows a calendar at in the top half of the screen and a list of today's appointments in the bottom half. Swiping over an event in the list shows options to colour it or edit it.

A button at the top cycles through three different views and the calendar can be expended to cover most of the screen or all of the screen. Like printed calendars, there is a great photo each month and this is used as the background.

Select the week view at the bottom and there are two different layouts. There is a traditional vertical one where each day is a tall narrow column and there is a great grid display in which the screen is divided into rectangles and there is one for each day. It is a great way to show a whole week's events on one screen and it is much better than the usual week display in calendars.

The Day view is standard and it is simply a list of time slots with events showing what is happening and at what time. All day events appear in their own section at the top.

Add calendar events

Tapping the plus button enables new items to be added and these can be events, reminders or events based on templates like Sick or Holiday. Events can be from 15 minutes to five hours or one to seven days.

A simplified form is used to add an event quickly, but it can be edited in exactly the same screen as used in Apple Calendar, so all the same options are available, such as repeat, travel time, invitees, alert, URL, photo and so on.

Customisation options

Customisation is a huge feature in PocketLife calendar and the options are extensive. The list is six screens deep, in other words there are so many you have to swipe up six times to get to the bottom!

Just a few of the options include setting a passcode to protect your calendars, set the start of the week and day, change all the colours of screen objects, change the pictures used as backgrounds, animation and dynamic motion effects, and many more.

There are too many options to list here and all I can say is that if you want a calendar that lets you tweak evert view and setting, you will like this one.

Summing up

PocketLife Calendar is not a separate stand-alone calendar app. It is a highly customisable alternative user interface for Apple Calendar. When an event is created in PocketLife, it is also created in Calendar and when an event is created in Calendar it is also visible in PocketLife.

The free version of the app has small ads that take up a little space at the bottom of some screens, but they don't get in the way. A more serious limitation is the number of events you can add.

It must be limited to around 20 events because I made around a dozen and found I had eight left. A paid upgrade is required to continue. However, events added using Apple Calendar do not count, so you could simply use the free version of PocketLife as an alternative viewer for your Apple Calendar events.

A PocketLife upgrade is $4.99 and it comes with this year and next year's calendars. After that there is a small fee for each year's calendar. It isn't expensive, but to get the most out of it you do need to upgrade.

App: PocketLife Calendar
Price: Free/$4.99
By: OvalKey Ltd
Size: 65 MB
iOS: 10.0 or later
Verdict: A great alternative interface for Apple Calendar.