Google Play Books vs Today

Google Play Books offers many options while reading such as bookmarks, highlights and notes. Making for a good app to use for academic .pdfs and .epubs.

Users can use the Google Play Books webpage or app to upload their own .epubs or PDFs.

Google Play Books has an inbuilt dictionary for users to use to look up unfamiliar words.

Margins, text size, line spacing and color theme of the page can be changed to the users liking,.

No matter what device one is using the Google Play Books service on it will sync all eBooks and placement into the cloud.

Google Play Books has built in immersive mode when reading. This allows for the navigation and notification bars to be hidden, allowing the full screen to be used for the eBook.

Like the majority of Google's apps, Google Play Books has a slick interface that works quite smoothly.

Google Play Books offers a dark and a light theme to make it easier to read in dark or light rooms.

Google Play Books has an in built eBook store within the app, making for a convenient way to purchase titles.

Text to speech can be used to have an eBook read to the reader aloud.

In addition to day, week and agenda views that have improved aesthetics and usability features compared to the stock app, there are also two views that combine agenda and month views in interesting ways.

One approach shows a complete, color-coded month with agenda view beneath it and the second shows a complete month that pops up agenda view when clicked on a date.

The app has minimalistic, semi-transparent, good-looking and customizable homescreen widgets for agenda and month views. Attributes that can be customized include choosing between light and dark themes, 12 and 24 hour clock, if the widget header should be displayed as well as adjusting opacity level and date range among other options.

On-screen notifications have a shortcuts for map and ability to snooze them.

Google Calendar has an easy to overview interface, that doesn't overwhelm with options. It's based on Google's stock Calendar application with modifications to user interface and functionality.

To quickly add an event, each view has an option to either click a plus button somewhere on the screen or long-press a date to bring up a form. The long-press form will allow entering only the event name and assume that it's an all day event, while the plus button form allows setting the event duration as well.

Both forms have an edit button for a adding more detailed information. This way in addition to selecting an event name and date, there's an ability to add location, start/end times, guests, description, color-code as well as choosing if it's an all day event, how often it repeats, how many and what kind of reminders are needed and setting your availability and privacy settings.

The app will color-code different calendars in different colors as well as allow selecting a different color for each event.

It has a 14-day trial and costs $2.99 to use full-time.

Google calendar allows setting how many reminders are needed with each having the ability to set how long before the event the notification should remind and if it should be done via on-screen or e-mail notification.

The app leverages Google Maps when adding location for an event by offering suggestions as well as offers opening Maps to help get directions to an event via shortcut on a reminder notification.