Review: Best Birthday 2.00 by Smartphoneware for S60 3rd & 5th

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Review: Best Birthday 2.00 by Smartphoneware for S60 3rd & 5th

by Ted Mc, from BlindMind.net

While we'll try and keep up with newer apps as they become availaable, sometimes we have to look backwards through our applications list to revisit those apps which have stood the test of time, proving themselves to be still very useful a year later. I'm as guilty as the next person of hearing about a new app, excitedly downloading it and installing it, thinking it will be something I'll use for the rest of my device's life.

And then deleting it a month later when I realize I've not used it more than just the one time when I first checked out its features.

This time I've chosen a gem of a program, which I have in fact made very good use of. Like many men, I have always been date-challenged. I can still tell you my phone number from when I was 7 years old, but ask me when so-and-so's birthday is, and my mind goes blank. Incidentally, it usually becomes un-blank the day after the event, or later, and has always bugged me.

Smartphoneware has been making apps since the very erly days of Symbian, and continues to be one of the most well-known developers making software for handsets today. Of particular interest to the blind or visually impaired, one of my favourite things about them is that their apps are simple, in that they're not filled with graphical images where text will do just as well. They're not flashy for the sake of being flashy. They stick, for the most part, to text-based tab sheets, making them instantaneously accessible to those of us using a screen reader. And while I'm not opposed to spending a lot of time labeling icons for a program that isn't accessible from the start, I will usually go with an equivalent or even slightly less featured application if I can just use it straight out of the box and not have to spend a lot of time tinkering with it. I just want it to work.

Best Birthday is such a program. It's predicated on the fact that you have filled in contact's birthdays when you put them into your phone. If you hadn't already, going through that little bit of pain to type the information into your contacts will then save you countless embarrassment in forgetting your Bosses wife's birthday. Or your mother-in-law's birthday!

It's designed to import birth dates from your contacts, and then put them into a month-by-month view, so you can easily see at the start of a month what birthdays you have coming up. But it doesn't stop there. Then you have a range of associations you can assign to those entries to be reminded when and how you like. If you don't want to add birthday info to your contacts, or want to remember the birthday (or any other important date such as anniversaries), you can add them as separate entries in the application itself. It will still auto-import any birthdates from your contact list, but here you can maintain a separate list.

Now it's time to set entry-specific options. You can set alarm reminders to pop up on your screen and tell you x number of days ahead of time either globally, or for a specific entry. Or you can also schedule automatic calling to ring them yourself to wish them a happy birthday, or simply schedule an automated SMS to go to them on their big day at the time you specify in advance. The text message it sends is done mail-merge style, so will use their name and/or age (be careful when using the age function!) when it sends them a text.

The last thoughtful thing this great app does is show you, when you're looking at your list of birthdays coming up, how old each person is, to save you working it out in your head. It just takes all the pain out of birthdays.

Now if it could just do the gift-shopping as well....

One feature I miss is the ability to do a little bit fancier messages for those people I wouldn't just want to send a 2-line text message to. I used to run another birthday app that had all sorts of SMS and MMS templates for sending of birthday messages. It was full featured in the message department, allowing you to insert various objects into each template, etc., but was totally lacking in the maintenance of a birthday list. You simply had to remember the day, and to go and compose a neat message with this other little program, which will remain nameless.

When i saw the organisational benefits of Best Birthday, I switched immediately and never looked back. But if they're wanting to add any functionality, I'd want more fully-featured options for composition of non-generic-looking personalised greetings.

The bottom line? Worth the price of admission, for sure. It's under $10 to buy. Download a free trial below and give it a go yourself.