Review: New Year Resolutions / 2011 Resolution Reminder
Score:
69%
January, the time of year when we all hope for a better life and do our best to make it happen by promising to do things about it – yes it’s the time to make a resolution for the New Year. But how to keep that spark of change alive throughout the year? How about New Year’s Resolution, an application from Marvellous that’s being heavily trailed in the Ovi Store - could this be the key to keeping you motivated and on top of the promises to yourself for 2011?
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First up, let me make a resolution on behalf of developers Marvellous; Use the same name for the application in the Ovi Store as on the device. Is this "2011 Resolution Reminder" (on Ovi) or "New Year Resolutions "(on the device)? And I thought the whole point of a Qt app was that it was compatible over all the modern Symbian platforms - so is there a need to have seperate S60 v5 and Symbian^3 versions? Anyway, on with the review.
While it will certainly help boost your willpower, you do need to have a certain amount of willpower in yourself. Consider “…Resolution” to be a magnifier, rather than a golden ticket, and you’ll be on the right track.
The application itself looks nothing like a regular application, and perhaps that’s a good thing. It reminds me more of what a busy family fridge would look like, with splashes of colour and jolly writing from a big marker pen. It’s slightly let down by going back to the default Nokia font for your resolutions, but I think I can forgive the developers this because the contrast does draw your eye towards them – which is the point of the application.
Once you’ve entered one (or more) of your resolutions, you have the option to add an alarm to remind you to do this – and you can go for a fixed day per week, every day, work days or weekends. This is the major let-down for me in the application, because the application does not interface with the calendar/alarm system built in to Symbian; you need to keep the application running in the background. It’s a solution, but not a great one.
The other area that can help keep you on track is sharing your resolutions on Facebook. Hitting the “Share on Facebook” button passes you into the web browser window with a confirmation button – which pops your resolutions up on your personal Wall in Facebook. Nothing like having a bit of peer pressure to help you through the weeks and months ahead.
It should be clear that New Year’s Resolution is a very specific type of To-Do list app – one that can get away with having a single grouping of things and a basic repeating alarm system. If there was a strong PIM system in the handset, this would be something that could be easily hacked together by any user. But the beauty of the Marvellous approach in this application is that is is very simple to use, keeps everything clear (and fun) to use, and I suspect for those of you that need a bit of a hand, will help with that tricky cliché of keeping to your resolutions.
-- Ewan Spence, Jan 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at