Momento app review

Front openeing page as show in the itunes app store

I've been using Momento for over a year now and for me it's been a pleasure I use. So many nice touches to the app with a fair bit of polish.
Let's start with the look of Momento. It's has clean crisp lines and soft colours. The page space is a soft faded white colour as if it were more of an old journal with a dark wood effect background behind the page space when pulled down. The font has a clean modern feel to it. Plus when you tap into a day, it lists the date in a nice bold modern layout. The home screen itself lists recent entry previews with day date to the left and month and year dividers across the screen as you scroll. Menu buttons at the bottom are a dark chocolate brown giving you the controls to switch from the above mentioned days view, to a calendar style month view, tag filtering view, or feeds view. At the very top there are two more buttons on the chocolate background, setting in the top left and new entry in the top right.

Month View as show in the itunes app store

Momento's month view is nice, similar to the iPhone calendar app in that it lists the days of the month which you can tap to jump to and also shows a dot in orange for a journal entry created in Momento or in blue for a social feed entry (both if both are present on that day). From this screen you can switch from month to month, one at a time or select a month and year from the controls at the top of the view.
The tags view is really handy and tags are one of my fav features about Momento. When ever you record a moment, you have a row of buttons above the keyboard that allow you to tag the event with people, places, events, custom tags and add pictures. The people tag not only allows you to create custom people but also searches your contacts list as you type the people tag name so if they are in there you can just tap them. Custom tags are handy too and can be anything you want. Pictures are another thing I think is a must have for an electronic journal and Momento allows you to add at least 8 pics to a single journal entry. I've not tried adding 8 to a single entry yet to be fair so could be possible to add more.
Coming back to the tags menu, being able filter by tags is a great feature. If you want to read back about a holiday in 2010, if you tagged each entry with #2010 family holiday it's a snap to pull up those entries. You can add multiple tags to an entry too. You might want to also tag the people you were with on holiday and maybe an activity such as #fun on the beach, which could be used for future beach holidays with your family for example.
Another nice feature of Momento is the ability to add a star rating to the entries you make each day. So you might have a great event with 5 stars and a ok one with 3 stars or however you want to use the system really. Again though, it's good if you like to look back over your entries and read some of the great moments. The stars help to highlight these as they are show along the bottom of each day in the day view along with number of tags, people tagged, pics added etc. And the stars and tags stand out as they are in orange which works well and looks good with the rest of the app design.

Day View of Entries as shown in the itunes app store

For people that like to post on social networks, Momento has the facility to import your social network feeds from most of the big social network names such as facebook, twitter etc. This is definitely a good time saving feature for those that like to post about what they are up to or have been up to on their social networks then just open Momento and let it pull in those posts. I setup Facebook on Momento as I do put the odd post on there about nice days out with the family and looked at twitter but most of my tweets are not really personal journal stuff. You can have Momento filter your twitter feed with a #m or #momento tag but you have to remember to tag the tweet you want to feed it. This helps reduce the clutter but again I personally don't put that much on twitter that I'd class worthy or a personal journal entry. There are a host of other social networks covered too but these are the only two I personally use at present.
Momento also has the option of setting a 4 digit security code which again could be handy for people wanting to keep their diary private.
Momento does have one negative for me personally at the mo and for other 2 negatives. These are backup system related and lack iPad support at this time. I do own an iPad myself but I'm not so bothered about that element however I can see why a fair few people out there would want this as its certainly easier to type on the bigger screen.
The backup issue though is one that bugs me. Currently you have to make a back up in app then connect your phone to iTunes and use the iTunes file transfer process to make a back up of your diary. This is rather out dated considering services like Dropbox have been around for donkeys years and with the introduction of iCloud. On contacting the devs via twitter they say they are working on both of these with syncing/remote backups being the top of the list. However according to in app reviews, they have been working on these features for something like a year now.
That's the only real niggle with Momento for me.

So in its current state without cloud backup I'd give it 4/5 as its a great all round journal app thats a real joy to use.
Depending on how they implement the cloud backup will depend on if I keep that rating, up it to 5/5 or even reduce it but for now I'll have to wait and see in hope that the update arrives.