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Late yesterday, the Financial Times reported that SwiftKey was in talks with Microsoft about a potential acquisition that could be officially announced during the week. The report was right and this morning both Microsoft and SwiftKey have made the news official on their respective blogs.
Microsoft acquired Sunrise Calendar earlier this year, and now comes the news that fans of Sunrise have been dreading. The Sunrise app is dead, but its features will be rolled into the existing Outlook app. Microsoft is still putting the finishing touches on the first Sunrise-infused Outlook update, but it has offered up some screenshots to tide you over.
In a move that isn't all that surprising, Sunrise Calendar now offers full support for Office 365 accounts. Considering that Microsoft bought Sunrise a few months ago, it was no great leap to expect better integration into that ecosystem. We already saw Wunderlist support added shortly after Microsoft bought them, too. Office 365 joins a hefty list of providers you can use with Sunrise.
Sunrise Calendar Adds Support For Wunderlist, See Scheduled Tasks Along With The Rest Of Your Agenda
From now on, you can add Wunderlist to the myriad services available for integration in Sunrise Calendar. Any tasks that have a date associated with them will appear alongside any other all-day events in your calendar. This is in line with Sunrise's philosophy that they "always pair what you need to do with a time when you’ll be doing it."
Making a new meeting usually requires going into your calendar app in some capacity, but the new version of Sunrise offers an alternative. You can simply switch to the Sunrise Meet "keyboard" to set things up. They call it a keyboard, but all it really has in common with other keyboards is that it's in the keyboard area of your screen.
Let's be honest here: you really don't give a crap about Arbor Day. But if you forget to record the season finale of The Flash, you're going to be out three bucks for a Google Play episode purchase. To help alleviate this first-world problem, Microsoft subsidiary Sunrise Calendar has added hundreds of TV shows across dozens of networks to its "Interesting Calendars" feature, allowing for quick and easy TV scheduling on top of its usual handy interface.
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- It's now double official. Microsoft announced the acquisition on its official blog, neglecting to mention exactly what would happen to the existing app as the team transitions to a new company. Sunrise has confirmed the same thing on their own website.
Last week the scuttlebutt around the strangely popular world of tech corporate acquisitions was that Microsoft had purchased Sunrise Calendar, a good-looking and well-received alternative to built-in calendar apps on Android and iOS. Today Microsoft has stated that yes indeed, they bought it, though they haven't confirmed the reported $100 million dollar price tag. The confirmation came in the form of a YouTube video that has oddly been set to private, but various news outlets including VentureBeat got a look at it before it went dark.
Like any company out there, Microsoft wants you to use its products. In those cases when you choose not to, it reserves the right to buy whatever it is that you actually are using. That way you're happy and you're still using Microsoft's stuff. Everybody wins, in a way.
There is no shortage of calendar apps for Android, each of which is looking for a way to set itself apart from the crowd. Lately I've settled in with Sunrise Calendar as my go-to, as it's just easy to use and provides all the features I want in a calendar. And it just got a little bit better.
There are innumerable calendar apps in Google Play, but one of the real standouts is Sunrise Calendar. This app has a clean interface, a solid widget, and support for plugins. However, it only worked with Google and iCloud accounts at launch. Now you can add Exchange to that list.
When an iOS app comes to Android, all too often it's merely a half-hearted copy, taking no notice of the user interface standards or the expanded capability of the platform. I'm happy to report that this is not the case with Sunrise Calendar, which has managed to gain quite a following across the way for its impressive layout and sunny visual design. It's available now for all Android devices running 4.0 or higher, though there's no tablet interface at the moment.