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Gadget

Review: LCD Clock iPhone App Proves to Be Wimpy [Hands On]

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When I learned the LCD Clock iPhone app, I was thrilled because I have distress getting to work on time every morning. For a $1, it wasn’t the clock I needed in my life.

I needed something that would successfully wake me up and it failed in that respect. Also, the calendar failed in it’s most fascinating feature—it didn’t show me the holidays. You can’t really go incorrect with showing a time, so its other features needed to make up for it.

Settings
If you double-tap the screen twice, it’ll take you to the appearance settings everywhere you can pick out the color show and set the brightness. Figuring out everywhere the other settings wasn’t so simple. For that, you’ll really have to go into Settings on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Here, you can change your show, clock behavior and calendar behavior.

Time
The time show is simple: choose your time separators, format, and whether you want to show it in 24-hour or 12-hour time. Back in the application, all you have to do is tap the time once to switch between 24-hour or 12-hour time (in view of the fact that I’m constantly switching back and forth between military time, I found this feature usefu). When the iPhone is a horizontal orientation, the clock will switch to a larger show making it simpler to read.

Calendar
In calendar settings, you can choose if your week starts on Monday. You can also choose whether you want to see holidays on a U.S. or a Japanese calendar. You can also have the calendar show up to 7 months (you use your finger to swipe across to change the months). Unfortunately, here’s no way to make the calendar show larger. A quick look-through to find out what day St. Meat pie’s day was on this year also proved fruitless.

Alarm
Here’s a clock icon in the upper right-hand corner of the app. Here you can click to turn on the alarm and set the time. The makers claimed that it might not work if the screen went dim or auto-locked (fortunately, here’s an option to disable auto-locking in Settings—I turned this feature on). I tried using the alarm while it sat charging on my desk, and right beside me undocked. The results? Each morning, I rolled into work and told my boss, “I’m so sorry about this morning…”

Verdict
Go buy yourself a double cheeseburger with that dollar.

[LCD Clock]