Birthday Reminder is an application for the iPhone and iPod touch that does exactly what it says it does. It reminds you of when all of your friends' birthdays are. There's not much to the app, yet it does its job very well.

When you first start the app, it will automatically list all of your contacts' birthdays gathered from your address book. You can also gather birthdays from your list of friends on Facebook. After you enter your Facebook account information, the app with start to sync, which actually takes quite a while. You may feel like your phone froze during this process, but you just have to be patient. Each contact in the list is nicely presented with a photo with a small icon of which app it received the birthday info from, address book or Facebook. You can toggle a little star in the upper left hand corner of the photo to mark your favorites. The far right side of each name displays that person's actual birthdate, showing the month and day. The middle displays how old the person is turning in how many days. For example, John Smith turns 26 in 18 days. The list of contacts are displayed in chronological order, with the birthday recently passed at the top and the birthdays furthest away at the bottom. There are also several themes for this list which are really just simple color schemes.

You have three options at the top of the screen. You can change the settings, search for a contact, or sync your list. The settings menu lets you enable sound, change the color scheme, set your email for notifications, and change settings for your address book or Facebook. The sound in the app is used when you navigate in and out of menus. It sounds like you are turning the page of a book. I'm really not a fan of this sound and prefer to disable it in the settings menu. You are offered eight different color schemes for the contacts screen. Even though it's only a color change, it's nice to have the option to customize the app a bit. The notifications option allows you to enter one email address to send reminders to. You can select the exact time and how many days before a birthday to send the email reminder. When the new iPhone OS 3 is released, this app will be ready to utilize push notifications. So, when a birthday comes up, you'll see a badge notification on the app icon. This is definitely a nice feature. The integration menu allows you to toggle sync on startup or to toggle address book and Facebook on and off. You also have the option to search for a specific contact in your list.

When you tap on a contact a new screen appears with more information. At this screen you get the contact's name, photo, age, birthdate, Western zodiac, and Chinese zodiac. This screen seems a little bare to me and feels like the developer missed an opportunity to give the user a little more. It would have been interesting to see what famous people share this person's birthday. Or, maybe a map to include place of birth. It just feels like something else should have been included here.s

Besides the ugly icon, sync time is really the only issue I have with this application. If you have "sync on start" turned on, you have to wait a little too long for it to sync before you can actually scroll through your contacts. This gets very annoying. Yes, you can turn off the option to sync on start, but if you add a contact to your list, you'd have to manually sync to get the information. Also, if someone changes their Facebook profile picture, you wouldn't know unless you manually synced. So, improving sync time would be a great update fix.

Overall, Birthday Reminder does a great job of reminding you of upcoming birthdays. It's a simple concept that's put together very nicely. I would strongly recommend this app to every iPhone and iPod Touch user who has family and friends and doesn't want to forget their birthdays. Check out the free version first if you're skeptical.