Custom reminder times come for free in Business Calendar Free

Need to set a calendar reminder that makes noise 1h15 min before the appointment starts? What about two hours and a half so it doesn't start screeming during a meeting? Or any other time that the list of presets in the stock Google calendar app doesn't cater for?

Pocket Informant and CalenGoo can do it, but they want your money. If you were looking for a free calendar app with your own custom reminders you were out of luck.

But not anymore. Business Calendar comes in two flavors. There's a paid version without ads, and a free version with ads from AdMob. Of course with a rooted phone and an app like AdAway...

Business Calendar has a clean uncluttered interface. Its event entry screen has a narrow strip on the right side that shows how the appointment you're about to enter fits in the rest of your schedule. That's a very useful feature.

And the reminder time entry box has a "individual reminder" field that lets you enter any reminder time you like. Seventeen minutes, eight hours, three days and a half, two weeks, anything goes. Every calendar app should let you do this, but few do.

There's room for improvement, though. You can't set time zones, you can't make events repeat every other week (most competing calendar apps can't do that either), the widgets are nowhere near as good as those in Smooth Calendar or Jorte, the week view only shows days in columns, and the zoom function (great feature) works very well in week view but not in month view (where you need it more).

And the swipe gestures are a little inconsistent. The agenda view is a vertical list of entries, so you scroll through it with vertical swipes. That makes sense. Horizontal swipes to scroll through the days and weeks make sense too. But scrolling through the months requires a vertical swipe, because a horizontal move takes you to a "half week" layout. Vertical in agenda view, horizontal to scroll through days, weeks, and months, maybe a future update will make the scrolls and swipes more intuititive?

Business Calendar force closed and made my phone freeze a bit too often. If stability of the app goes up and the swipes get more consistent Business Calendar could become my default calendar.
Edit: a few updates killed the bugs. The force-closes are a thing of the past. Business Calendar is now my default calendar app.

• Business Calendar Free