BGR Breaks it Down: Subscribing to calendars on your iPhone
A sometimes overlooked feature that has been made incredibly simple on the iPhone is the ability to subscribe to a variety of calendars. Many are familiar with CalDAV as it adds a quick and easy way to keep your iPhone or iPod touch in sync with your Google Calendar, but did you know you can also add a wide range of publicly available calendar subscriptions in a matter of seconds? One of the more common subscriptions is the US holidays calendar but you can also quickly and easily add TV show schedules, network premier schedules, sports team schedules, movie releases, concert tour schedules and plenty more to your iPhone calendar. Hit the jump to find out how.
The easiest way to add calendar subscriptions is to start by finding a good directory. There are a few decent ones out there but for the purposes of this quick how-to we’ll use iCal World (another popular one is iCalShare). Simply pull the site up in Safari on your iPhone and have a look through the various available subscriptions. When you find one you like — yep, you guessed it — click on it.
Provided the link is alive of course, Safari will ask you’d like to subscribe to the calendar in a pop up message. Tap “Subscribe” and your iPhone will do just that. Once you see a confirmation message you’re good to go, and you can even tap “View Events” in the pop up to see your new events in the Calendar app.
As with most things, there is a “but” involved. You’ll find that many of the calendars you try to subscribe to are no longer maintained. As such, it can take a bit of searching to find what you’re looking for. Once you do find it though, adding the subscription to your iPhone couldn’t be easier.
Now THAT’S a function you can’t yet duplicate with a Symbian device as far as I know! Very nice, and a great idea. Hope the Symbian Devs are paying attention…
Woo-hoo!! Finally I’m first!! Getting up early paid off for once!
How do you unsubscribe?
@Jack – You’ll find the new subscription listed under Mail, Contacts, Calendars in Settings and you can delete it from there just like an email account.
Lol @ adding TV show schedules. With all the other options out there, do any BGR readers actually still watch TV in realtime?
its good for programming the dvr, etc.
Looks like iphone is taking a few plays out of the palm pre handbook.
John, I believe that the iphone had this feature in the previous firmware versions. I believe that there was a limiation in calendars though.
Works pretty nice. Wife has an iPhone one and so do I. Both of us share our calendars (google calendar) with one another and when she makes an appointment I can see it and vise versa.
FYI – Apple has their own calendar download webpage: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/calendars/
Is this feature 3gS only!?!
Posted from BGR Mobile (iPhone) at: New York United States
Works on my 3.0 3G
Can BlackBerry do this?
Well I had been wondering how to add holidays easily and now I have thanks! Took about 30 seconds total from hitting your link and add the new event to my iPhone 3gs. Thanks again!
Awesome BGR!
AWESOME FIND
Nice but without the ability to add a calendar that you can actually use “they’re not accepting new calendars”….then it’s useless.
Most of these calendars are pretty dated. Sports are mostly last years. Apples websited does not support mobile subscription.