ENJOY Lifestyle & Leisure
BEDSIDE ALARM CLOCK
TimeTuner
£1.79 An elegant clock radio for your bedside
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SWEET DREAMS Wake up and fall asleep to your favourite radio station
KEY INFO
UK price £1.79 US price $2.99 Web www.dreamsurface.com
Download size 9.8MB iPod touch compatible Yes Requires iOS 3.1.3 or later
he idea of using your iPhone or iPod touch as a clock radio isn’t particularly original, but we like this little app because it manages to pack so much in but at the same time feels elegant and useful. Designed to sit vertically in a powered dock (such as a speaker system), it displays a clock that shows any alarms you have set plus, optionally, the time in your home time zone; it’s a boon for travellers. Tap the screen once and everything but the time display slides away. You can set multiple alarms and have them trigger on specific days. Opt for either an alarm sound or for it to open an internet radio station. Usefully, you can define a backup sound in this latter case so that if it can’t pick up the station you defined, it still wakes you up with the alternative alarm.
It’s also possible to listen to the radio at any time, or to hook into your iPod’s playlists to play your music through the app. A clever, unobtrusive slider at the bottom of the app will set a sleep timer that counts down so you can fall asleep to music. Sadly, the only browsing option is by playlist, so it’s hard to listen to podcasts or audiobooks. Although BBC radio stations are available through the service that provides the internet radio for TimeTuner, they don’t actually show up in the app (with the exception of the World Service), presumably because they use an incompatible codec. The app needs to be running for alarms to sound. However, we’re paranoid, and always kept a backup alarm in Clock, although TimeTuner seemed stable, as well as clean and attractively designed. ●
4
Despite the BBC absence and some other glitches, TimeTuner is a recommended purchase
DESK CLOCK
ALARM CLOCK
£0.59 Clack! Clack! Clack! It’s retro clock time!
FREE Feature-packed alarm clock
FlipTime
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ON A ROLL Watch time tick by with this retro clock and calendar
KEY INFO
UK price £0.59 US price $0.99 Web www.omletworks.com Download size 1.5MB iPod touch compatible Yes Requires iOS 2.2 or later
82 The 2011 iPhone app guide
he App Store isn’t short on clock apps, but with SpoonJuice’s Night Stand being downloaded more than three million times, there’s clearly an appetite. This one caught our eye, and though it’s hardly the most feature-packed app ever developed, it’s cheap and charming. It’s essentially a software version of an old flip clock. As the seconds, minutes, hours and days march past, the cards flick down to update – and all with a satisfying (though optional) clack. It overrides your auto-lock settings too, so you can dock it and use it as a sweet clock for your desk or bedside. ●
If you’re a fan of analogue, retro styling, then this is a bargain
iHome+Sleep
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earch for ‘alarm clock’ and you’ll net almost 200 results in the App Store, but we’ve highlighted this one because it promises a rich, rewarding experience. It uses ‘sleep cards’ that you configure to a bewildering degree. Define go-to-sleep music to drift off to, rise-and-shiney music to wake to, times, days, snooze periods, wake-up mantras and more. In theory, it’s lovely. In practice, though, music sometimes doesn’t play, it’s a pain for podcasts, the weather widget is US-only, and, depending on what speaker system you use by your bed, you can be blasted awake by the poor volume controls. ●
Packed with features it promises a lot but fails to deliver
KEY INFO
UK price Free US price Free Web www.ihomeintl.com Download size 7.5MB iPod touch compatible Yes Requires iOS 3.2 or later
MR SANDMAN Track your sleeping habits so you can see how much shuteye you’re getting