One of the design goals w/ Tempo was to mimic the interaction and design patterns as closely as we could to the native calendar. The iterations of Tempo over the past yr have been really interesting, we started w/ a UI that looked very different to a calendar but as we user-tested, we kept iterating and it started looking more and more like the native calendar.

Sunrise, I think is a great social calendar and I love their tight integration w/ Facebook (assuming you are ok w/ Facebook). With Tempo, we focused on busy people w/ a lot of meetings and events and thus why we integrated Exchange and surface email, docs, conf calls – it’s the mtg warrior (which I used to be!)

Sunrise makes efficient use of screen space for things like birthdays – 4 of my friends had birthdays today and it took up very little space in Sunrise and most of my screen in Tempo.

Tempo’s discovery of conference call #s and access codes seems superior but the event display, with participant profile photos, is more appealing in Sunrise.

Overall, Sunrise’s event list display with icons seems more visually appealing, though not as efficient as Tempo’s, which seems more Google-like overall.