They might be very similar in how they are stored and triggered, but accessing them is quite different. There is a clear API for calendar, both in QtMobility and in the platform libraries. However for Alarms, I haven't found any good documentation, so it will require much more experimentation and trial-and-error before I get something working. In contrast, calendar events can be obtained through documented APIs and there are even several open source applications that I can peek at to get some real-life working code examples as a base. So, while Alarm conditions are actually much easier to implement if the API is figured out, in reality I expect it to be much more rocky road. The D-Bus examples that you've digged out will be very helpful when I will start to look at it, so thanks for them - without those I wouldn't even know where to begin.