UpTo Calendar comes to Android: Hands on with the social calendar

The Mayan calendar ended on December 21, 2012, but if those guys had UpTo, the calendar would never end. UpTo is a social calendar app that made its mark on iOS and has now moved to Android. We go hands on with the app to see if it's worthy of celebration.

One of the more popular apps for iOS devices has made the transition over to Android, as UpTo popped up in the Google Play Store Monday. The social calendar promises to make your future more interesting by highlighting events you might be interested in and aggregating your friends’ schedule into your planner so you won’t miss anything they’re up to (get the name now?). It has a lot of potential to fill your calendar with awesome events, or turn you into the ultimate party crasher, depending on how you use it.

To hook with UpTo is that it always looks toward the future. Facebook is like a collection of things that have already happened; Twitter is like a stream of what’s happening at the moment; and UpTo tells you what’s going to happen. It does this by taking your existing calendars and placing all of the shows, parties, and special occasions into a Twitter-like stream. Linking your Facebook account will draw in all of the happenings from your Events page. Using a Gmail account will pull all of the Google Calendars’ events. It pulls events from all kinds of services together into one feed. To the app’s credit, the feed works well. Everything looks very unified even though the information is coming from multiple locations, and interaction with an individual event is easy. It’s a visually pleasing app. It makes something pretty plain – a calendar – look sleek and modern.

Of course, what fun are all these awesome occasions – or mundane tasks – if you can’t tell your friends all about it? That’s where the social aspect of UpTo kicks in. By adding friends from your email contacts or Facebook, you’ll be able to see what’s on their agenda as well. This makes sharing event information easy. Then again, if your friends are terrible people, they may use that information against you. As such, you don’t have to share every event you’re planning to take part in and neither do your friends, so information can be kept private. That way your business partners won’t know about the pedicure that you took a half-day off to get.

Social events don’t just stop at your friends as UpTo has amassed over 800 event streams that you can “Discover,” subscribe to, and include in your calendar. Fans of most professional and college sports can add the entire schedule of your team of choice; Movie and TV buffs can add lists of major release dates and premieres; and citizens of major cities can subscribe to see the biggest events that are coming through town. When the creators of the streams update their events, like if the team you follow makes the playoffs, the new happenings appear automatically on your calendar. You can then comment or like those events to make your thoughts known, allowing you to socialize with people all over that are interested in the same occurrences as you.

As solid in its execution as it is in appearance, UpTo lives up to everything you’d expect out of it. It’s quite the task to make a calendar interesting, but UpTo manages to do so in a way that doesn’t stray too far from the initial purpose of keeping track of events. The social aspect is sure to be great for party planners and those who are looking for some extra company for a show or concert. It strips away a lot of the unnecessary details of events on other platforms, keeps only the most pertinent of information, and makes it easy to manage in your personal schedule or send out for others to join in. UpTo is an app worth checking for the event planner in you.

You can download UpTo for free from the Google Play Store. It is also available for free on iPhone.