Pregnancy: Week by Week – A month-by-month guide

Forty weeks. That’s the length of an average pregnancy. For some women, the time flies and they find themselves in the delivery suite before they’ve had time to buy the newborn sleep-suits. For others, dealing with morning sickness and an aching back, it can seem much longer. Whatever her individual situation, at some point in those forty weeks, the iPhone-owning mum-to-be will probably find herself browsing the AppStore for an application such as Arawella Corporation’s Pregnancy: Week by Week.

There are multitudes of pregnancy applications out there, and while Pregnancy: Week by Week isn’t amongst the best of them, it’s far from the worst. If you can get past the fact that the first screen asks you to provide your full name, weight, height and date of conception without giving an indication of what this information will be used for, you’ll find that there are a lot of great features here. You can use the application to keep a pregnancy diary; scheduling appointments, tracking your weight and measurements and uploading photos of your growing bump. In the ‘birth’ section, there’s also a kick counter, due date calculator, contraction counter, shopping list and a birth announcement that can be sent via Facebook and Twitter.

You’ll soon notice, however, that the application’s name is misleading. The ‘week by week’ information that seems quite comprehensive in week one is exactly the same as the information that’s provided for weeks two, three and four. Indeed, throughout your pregnancy, these guides and to-do lists only change monthly.

What really differentiates this application from other multi-feature pregnancy applications is its focus on nutrition. When you’re pregnant, it’s said that you’re eating for two – and the food tracker here could almost be an application in itself. I got quite excited about using the barcode scanner to enter food, but again I was let down. Perhaps this feature works better in the US, but here in the UK, it couldn’t identify Kellogg’s Bran Flakes and it suggested potato crisps when I scanned my salt. It’s also worth noting that the goal given is 1950 calories a day, which is less than the 2100 recommended for pregnant women on NetDoctor. As nutritional requirements vary, it might be worth checking this one with your health professional.

Despite some disappointing limitations, this application delivers a lot for £0.59. However, as you make your way through those forty weeks, waiting for your own special delivery, you may also want to check out iPhoneAppCafe’s 5 Essential iPhone Apps for Pregnancy.