I recently traded in my dying Palm Treo for an iPhone and so far I love it, for the most part. However, there are several aspects of the built-in calendar that frankly annoy the shit out of me, especially in comparison with my old Palm:
-you cannot click on a space on the calendar and produce an event at that time.
there appears to be no way to produce events that recur, say, on the second Sunday in October, or on the first Saturday of the month, or even (iirc) every second Sunday.
there is a small and limited number of possible advance warning times. I used to be able to set up a warning 45 minutes or 3 hours in advance of an event. No more.
there is no way to change the default alert tone away from a quiet, wimpy “meep meep” and to something I might hear while, say, asleep or in the next room. Also the tone does nor repeat or have a snooze function.
Are there any apps or similar that either upgrade or replace the built-in calendar?
You can add events, by clicking on the plus symbol on the upper right hand side of the app, and there are a number of different options for warning alerts by time and tone.
But frankly while the default app is sufficient for me , it really does not look anymore complex that a standard cellphone calendar, which means your gonna have to do trial and error on the paid apps, or try google for its cloud calendar.
Sorry I could’nt help more.
This won’t solve the notice sound issue you’re having (which I hate), but the rest of them can be solved by syncing with Google Calendar. You can set the GCalendar as an icon, as Google has most of their apps in HTML5, so it works well. You can switch over to the desktop version to do more detailed things like setting something for every third Thursday, or every 2nd Tuesday in April, etc.