Time Cave is an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows you to schedule an email to be sent in the near or distant future. You can send emails an hour later or years later. It can useful as a simple reminder tool or you can simply send yourself an inspirational message five years into the future. Time Cave was originally a website, and now you can manage your scheduled emails on your iPhone. To start using the app, you need to create an account. Once the account is created you will have access to both the iPhone app and the website.

The user interface is very basic, with little options for customization. You can schedule a message to yourself or to someone else. The only difference between the two is that when you send a message to yourself, you don’t need to enter in your own email address. When sending an email to someone else, you’ll need to enter in the recipient’s email address, subject and body. Then, you can select the date and time to send the email. The first problem is that you can’t access your address book from the app. You have to manually type in the person’s entire email address. This is very inconvenient and unattractive for any messaging application. Also, there is no support for landscape mode, so you can forget about typing long emails.

There is also an “advanced scheduling” option that will allow you to more easily schedule an email to be sent at a date far into the future. For example, instead of having to scroll through and select the specific date and time, you can choose to have the email sent five week from today or two years from today. These emails will be sent at 6:00AM on the date selected. The only odd thing here is that this advanced screen is the same as the regular screen, with the added “From Now” option, and without the times. It’s just unnecessary to have a separate button for it. It should all be on one screen.

You can view all your scheduled messages in a separate area. However, there are no options for editing or rescheduling. You can only view or delete. This is especially frustrating, as you may actually want to reschedule a message or change what the message says.

Time Cave is a nice idea and may be a fun way to send some messages to yourself years into the future. However, I don’t see it serving as a reminder app, as you already have the default calendar app for that. With the huge lack of features, this is not something you will use very often, if at all. I do not recommend making this purchase.

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