LaterDude Pro review

Mary Branscombe

We review LaterDude Pro, a reminder utility for making calls and sending messages - later

Published on Feb 2, 2010

You have your BlackBerry with you most of the time, but that doesn’t mean you remember to do everything. Some things you can’t do straight away; if you want to phone the doctor to book an appointment, you have to wait until the surgery is open.

And if you deal with everything that needs answering straight away, your BlackBerry can turn into a millstone that destroys your work life balance.

LaterDude helps you get organised without being tied to the screen by letting you schedule reminders that include the phone number or email address you need to call, text or email – which makes it that little bit easier to make the call or send the message when you get the reminder.

The free LaterDude app lets you schedule reminders to make phone calls for numbers that are on the call log (calls you’ve missed or people you phone often); you can choose a reminder up to a week ahead and add a note to remind you why you wanted to call them.

LaterDude Pro lets you schedule reminders to email or send a text message as well and you can add the reminders to the task list or directly to the calendar – so if you sync your calendar with your PC, you’ll see the reminder there as well.

The LaterDude Pro icon doesn’t open a list of reminders – just the options you can pre-set. This lets you choose whether you want reminders as tasks or calendar entries (or whether you want to choose each time), the default length for calendar entries (so you can block out 5 or 15 minutes for your calls) and whether you want to see the LaterDude option on the menu in all applications or just the address book, call log, email and SMS apps.

You can also set the type of reminder you use most often – meet, contact, call, email or SMS – but this also depends on where you’re using LaterDude Pro from.

If you set a reminder from an email message, you always get a reminder to send an email, and the same for an SMS. If you set a reminder from the call log or the address book, you can choose a reminder to email, SMS, call, meet or contact the person (and the cursor will be on the type you set in Options, to save time).

If you want to phone someone who has emailed you, you can click through to their contact details from their name and pick Call as the reminder type so this is very flexible.

Choosing the time for the reminder is also flexible: you can click on the date and time in the dialog directly or pick times from five minutes to 3 weeks ahead (in helpful intervals like 12 and 15 hours, so you can set reminders for the morning when you leave work in the evening).

You can change the time in the reminder dialog again, and add a note about what you want to say; if you start from an email, you get the message in the notes field as a reminder.

When your reminder pops up – which currently only works for calendar entries – it has the phone number or email address ready for you to click on. And that means you’re slightly more likely to actually do it when you get the reminder.

Having the number of the person you’re meeting in the appointment is very useful if you’re delayed (or lost). There are some rough edges in LaterDude, but there are frequent updates too. If you need reminding of who you need to get in touch with and when, this is a powerful but simple tool for the price.