Review: Palmary Clock

If you're looking for an elegant clock that has robust features, then read our review.

Review: Palmary Clock

Ratings:
By: Christopher Meinck

When I first installed Palmary Clock on my PalmOne Treo 600, I was expecting a visually appealing clock. I was not disappointed and was pleasantly surprised by a host of features offered with Palmary Clock.

Eye Candy

Palmary Clock comes standard with a visually stunning "aqua" clock reminiscent of Apple's Mac OS X. Using the up and down on the 4 way dial allows you to toggle between a white or blue background. The second hand ticks away. The beautiful visual will make you long for a hi-resolution Treo screen (with the Treo 650 coming soon, we might not have to wait long). The application allows you to choose from skins that are available through their website. It was difficult to find the link. I would have liked them to include more skins, but I assume they want to keep the size of the application/skins down. Since you can download them, it's just an extra bit of effort to skin your clock.

Calendar

From the application, you can select the Calendar function which will provide you with monthly view only using the selected background. During my review, the aqua background displayed with "today's date" highlighted in red. In this view, you'll also see the date (August, 26, 2004, Thursday, 7:44 pm). Attractive, but it would be nice to see my calendar events and to-do's within this view as I enjoyed the look of the aqua calendar view.

Alarming? Yes

You're on a business trip, you've encountered a broken clock and don't want to rely on the hotel staff to handle a wake up call? You're in luck if you've got Palmary Clock. As I write this review, I'm returning from a week long business trip that featured daily meetings at 8:30 and would have been lost without Palmary Clock. On my first night, I set up an alarm in Palmary Clock as a backup. Well, suffice to say, Palmary Clock to the rescue. Bright and early, Palmary Clock chimed the "Bonyparte" ringtone. I don't recommend this ringtone as a wakeup, but you can count on Palmary Clock as alarm during business trips. You can choose from any installed Midi tone or MP3. You have the ability to set multiple alarms for different events or simple reminders.

Ready, Go

If stopwatches are your thing, this app comes with feature rich stopwatch. I could see this being handy if you're a swim coach, for a track meet or other sports event where time is critical.

The World In Palm

Select World Time and your greeted with a beautiful image of the world map. Living in NYC, there was a red dot indicating the first city. You can display up to 4 cities and the selection is endless. Click the checkbox and you'll see where on the map the city lies and the time is displayed in a list format beneath.

A Time Utility Belt

I had never heard of a Time Utility until this application, but it's actually a cool feature. It will alert you as to the sunrise and sunset. Similar to the world map, you can select up to four cities. Palmary will let you know what time it is in that particular city. For example, "when it is 7:57 in New York, it is 8:57 in Tokyo Day After". If you do business overseas or travel internationally, I could imagine this would be valuable.

Full Moon Rising

Extending the app even further, you can view all the phases of the moon. Not my thing, but once again, a nice graphic rendition of the moon appears in this tool.

Overall

The usefulness of Palmary Clock depends on your needs. Palmary Soft starts with and elegant looking, customizable clock application complete with multiple alarm clocks and an exhaustive list of time features from World Time to full featured Stopwatch. For more information, please visit Palmary Software.

Palmary Clock is available for trial and retails for $15.95.