It’s been a while since Google bothered to touch the Google Calendar app, which has more or less remained just a mobile version of the good old desktop service. With Android 5.0 Lollipop due to be rolled out to Nexus devices later today, Google has updated the Calendar app with ‘Material design’ while making it smarter and more useful.
It’s designed to be a helpful assistant, so you can spend less time managing your day, and more time enjoying it.
Google Calendar on Android has been manual entry and update more or less. With the latest update, Google has set out to build a smart assistant that’s always at your service. This includes turning emails into events automatically.
Every time you book a flight, buy concert tickets, or make a hotel reservation, odds are you get an email with dates, times and other important details. But who has the time (or patience) to copy and paste all this into their calendar? In the new Calendar app these kinds of emails become events automatically, complete with things like flight numbers and check-in times. They’ll even stay updated in real time if your flight’s delayed, or you receive another email update.
Basically, Google Calendar has become an extension to Google Now, which was doing most of these stuff without actually updating your calendar. Busy professionals do share their calendar for others to check and schedule the meetings appropriately, so this can be extremely useful for such scenarios.
In order to make things easier for things where it still needs manual intervention, Google Calendar app can now suggest titles, people and places as you type, as well as adapt to your preferences over time. Google calls this Assist (pretty appropriate).
Also, keeping in the latest image heavy design trends, the Calendar app carries a refreshingly new Schedule view that includes photos and maps of the places you’re going, cityscapes of travel destinations, and illustrations of everyday events like dinner, drinks and yoga. The new Calendar app will work on all devices running Android 4.1 and above, with the iPhone version being in works, and as always the rollout will happen in a phased manner, so note that it might take a while before you actually see the updated app in the Play Store.