Over the last two weeks, I’ve been looking at two replacement applications for the built in S60 calendar, and now it’s time to look at both Papyrus and Aqua Calendar head to head.

First of all, both are cracking applications and I’d be happy with either one – they both offer the power and the flexibility that Calendar junkies crave. They also both offer trial/demo periods, so if you can spare the time, you can examine them both.

I’ve drawn up three main categories on how to judge the applications – we’re into a best of three here.

Installation and Set up

Both applications use SIS files, of course, so it’s a one click operation to put the applications in your smartphone. Given that I always wanted these applications to be available, they went onto the internal disk, of course, so the respective file sizes (Aqua is around 500k, Papyrus is just over 1Mb) might need to be watched if you have a lot of data on your phone.

Both applications have extensive preferences screens to allow you to tweak the set-up, but here Papyrus lets itself down, mainly because it (I suspect) has a code base that is geared to run on Symbian, Palm and Windows Mobile, and so isn't fine tuned to S60's way of doing things. It also doesn’t have a central point to set up all the screens – you need to go into each setting panel from each screen. Aqua Calendar uses the regular S60 tabbed dialog called from an icon list. It follows the style guide and, even with the complex task it has to achieve, makes the user feel more comfortable.

Aqua Calendar is the smaller application, makes a better job of setting up the initial screens and the user interface is what people expect. So first round to Aqua Calendar.

Aqua Calendar in action...

Interface and Displays

Papyrus carries three main screens from the view menu, while Aqua Calendar carries eleven. That’s a big difference, though it’s important to point out that you’re not going to have all eleven in constant rotation with Aqua Calendar – you’ll set it up and settle on the main screens that you use to see your information. I’m confident that 90% of users will end up with the same screens that you are provided with in Papyrus, but the fact that Aqua Calendar gives you the choice is important to me.

But then I’m not a fan of all the graded colour shading that’s present in Aqua Calendar, and it seems to be the one option that isn’t present (to remove) in all the colours and lines and settings. Papyrus is much cleaner – and you all know how much I love a clean app, with a small font packing in the information.

On the other hand though, Aqua Calendar does manage to pack in information from your Inbox and Contacts databases. And the timeline it can present of SMS messages is incredibly useful for people who use SMS heavily (that would be me). It’s a suprising addition for a Calendaring application, but it does work. So, finely balanced as this call is, I think that the messaging integration gives this one over to Aqua Calendar.... just.

Entry and Editing

Both applications have a two-step method for editing information. Once you select an entry on a screen, you get a full display of just the information, and a second click is required to actually edit the entry. Papyrus goes for a simple 'put everything on one screen' edit, while Aqua Calendar goes for the tabbed approach, but somehow manages to use icons instead of text, which means it doesn’t actually look like a tabbed view. You can edit much more information in Aqua Calendar than Papyrus

That said, most Calendar entries don’t need a huge amount of information, so the extra information that Aqua Calendar provides just feels like information overload. On balance, I prefer Papyrus for editing and entering info. This round goes to Papyrus.

Papyrus in action...

Summary

Comparing applications that have exactly the same goal (i.e. make a better Calendar) is always going to be tricky, and although each category was very close, there has to be a declared winner. And with a 2-1 score, the All about Symbian best Calendar replacement goes to Aqua Calendar from Pocket Torch by a very small margin.

Ewan Spence, 19th December 2006