Samsung Calendar for Galaxy Tab: complete review

Samsung Calendar is a free Get Things Done (GTD) app by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. It’s available on Samsung devices as a preinstalled app. You can also download it from Galaxy Store. We’re not sure if it’s available on all Samsung devices, so if your device is not supported, please let us know.

New events

Creating new events is intuitive and simple. As is to be expected, you can pick the exact date and time slot for your event. You also colour-code your events, in Samsung Calendar. For some calendars, you can even add an emoji to give your event a personal touch. You can, of course, add all the important details to your events:

• location
• basic notes
• attachments
• time zone.

We wish we could add a bit of structure to our notes, though. Some basic formatting wouldn’t hurt. Samsung Calendar also limits the types of attachments you can add to your events, and where you attach them from. Your images can only come from the Gallery, and your PDFs from Samsung Notes. You are also limited to one attachment per event, and for some calendars, you can’t add attachments at all. The inconsistency is annoying.

Events, in Samsung Calendar, have a start date and/or time and an end date and/or time. You can also set multiple alerts several weeks before the event. You definitely won’t be missing events you want to attend.

Repeating events have all the options you’d expect, including when to end the repeats. You can even repeat your tasks a certain number of times.

Calendars

You can add many calendars to Samsung Calendar, using your Samsung account, that you can share with other Samsung users. You can organise your calendars for different aspects of your life; work, education and vacation. You can invite 99 invitees for each calendar. Should you find yourself needing more, you’re probably using the wrong app.

You can only add third-party accounts for Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange. That is not a lot of accounts. At least the integration is a two-way stream. Changes you make in Samsung Calendar on your Google account, reflect in Google Calendar. Your calendars can be different colours to make them easier to tell apart. When you’re overwhelmed, you can hide some of them to help you focus.

Organisation

Samsung Calendar has a left sidebar for navigating your calendar and its different views. The month view is our favourite. You can add handwritten annotations to it. We hope Samsung can extend this feature to all the views in the app. Well, except for the year view, of course.

Samsung Calendar permanently highlights your all-day events. But for your short ones, you can remove the highlighter. You also get to choose how bright your highlights are. Your highlights are not limited to the month view. It also applies to your week and day views. Another feature you find on all views is the font size for your events.

App integration

Samsung Calendar displays your date-based to-dos from Samsung Reminders. Reminders, in the app, have a bell icon which differentiates them from your events. Completed reminders are struck out, which you guys know we absolutely love! This integration helps, so you don’t schedule too many things at the same time.

We love the weather integration, which gives you the weather forecast for about seven days. It’s useful to know what the weather will be like when planning an event. The weather information is tiny though, you can almost miss it.

Search tool

Samsung Calendar searches for events and reminders. We love that you can use stickers and colours to find your events. It makes colour-coding your events that much more useful. You can also edit your events from the search results, which is fantastic. Sadly, the app doesn’t search your annotations.

Recycle bin

Samsung Calendar has a recycle bin, where you can restore events you have accidentally deleted. You can also restore events deleted in Google Calendar; how awesome is that? You have 30 days to restore your items before they are permanently deleted.

Widgets

Samsung widgets are awesome! Especially, for someone who is used to boring Apple widgets. The countdown widget is our favourite. The month widget is also amazing, for viewing your monthly schedule without needing to open the app. We love Samsung widgets so much, we’ll do a dedicated video covering them. They are simply awesome! At this point, we’re not sure if these are really Samsung widgets or Android in general.

Verdict

Samsung Calendar is a great calendar app, with exciting widgets and handwriting for your month view. Sadly, it is limited to Samsung devices, which locks you in the Samsung ecosystem. We were also not able to find holiday calendars, a must for a calendar app.