Nokia N97 App: DreamLife Review
Your phone comes with a calendar and alarm, but are you really getting the best from them? DreamLife is an attempt to take the basic PIM functions of your S60 phone and rework them into something more useful, combining them with your contacts to help you to sort your life out. Does it work? Find out in our DreamLife review.
Our first impressions of DreamLife could be summed up by the comment, “This looks a bit complicated.” Not the reaction we would expect from a Personal Information Manager (PIM) intended to simplify our affairs.
There are a lot of options here. DreamLife takes the basic calendaring provided with S60 phones and adds a lot of potentially useful features to allow some really fine-grained organisation of your appointments and contacts.
The basic view in DreamLife is fairly similar to the standard S60 calendar, but once you start to add events the differences become apparent. Information is crammed into the screen of your phone – DreamLife makes extensive use of pop-up windows to show you the detail of what lies within one of the tiny grid-squares representing a day, week or even hour of one of its many views.
When you create an event, the screen will split to show you a view of other events that day. Annoyingly, despite the ability to see a day view while you create an event, you can’t just drag the boundary of the event around to set start and end times but must manually tap in the times. There are several examples of this kind of oversight – understandable given that DreamLife runs on several versions of S60, but it feels like a missed opportunity when using a touchscreen phone.
Because DreamLife tries to cram so much on screen, entering data can be a bit fiddly. You can zoom in and out out of a calendar view using the volume keys though, which helps somewhat. There are multiple views – day, week month, etc. and you can filter out whole categories of event or colour code event types to help you understand a cluttered schedule.
DreamLife also takes care of your contacts and will present them in a much better-looking and space-efficient way than the standard contacts app. Contacts can be associated with events and may be tagged with multiple categories.
DreamLife’s Category system is hierarchical – e.g. a contact or event can be designated as ‘Supply’ which is a sub category of ‘Business’. If you have to juggle a lot of contacts this kind of granularity is invaluable, although perhaps overkill for the more casual user. When it comes down to it, that is true of the whole package. If you need to be super-organised and are the kind of person with extra pages sellotaped in your organiser and wallcharts full of to-do lists the DreamLife may be one of the smartest purchases you ever make for your Nokia phone.
If on the other hand, you just need a ‘bit of a sort out’ then DreamLife will probably be rather overwhelming in its scope and configurabilty. This, plus some concerns about the fiddly interface prevent us from giving DreamLife full marks, but this is a rich app that will reward the time spent in understanding it.
Details
Price: 35 Euros
Size: 1.7 MB
Check out our DreamLife on Nokia N97 review photo gallery:
