Spb Time review

I wouldn't be writing this review at all if Windows Mobile 5 didn't have some serious shortcomings in the alarms department. As a recent deserter from the Palm camp, I'd been used to using my PDA (a Palm TX) as my alarm clock - I always had it with me and with some add-on midi files the sounds were fine for waking me up. Trying to use the WM5 Alarm applet in my Orange SPV M600 to do the same thing got me in to trouble. Sometimes the alarm just wouldn't sound at all, leading to some embarrassing oversleeping incidents, and if it did sound, there was often no way of cancelling the alarm, so it just kept on sounding. A bit of googling revealed that these were known issues that had been around a while but which Microsoft had not thought important enough to fix. My searches also revealed that there was no easy solution to these problems.

I tried a couple of freeware alarm programs, but wasn't particularly impressed - some of them suffered from the same issues as the built-in app, and all had pretty ropey UIs. So I turned to the commercial solutions. Spb Time was actually the third of these that I tried. One of a suite of applications from the same developers, Spb Time's UI is anything but ropey, my alarms now go off when I want them to and can be cancelled by a nice big red button or snoozed with a big green one. I also now have a very nice skinnable clock and world clock, countdown timers and stopwatches (with lap times that can be saved to a text file) all accessible through a Today plugin. Alarms can be set to go off on particular days of the week, so it is easy to set different alarms to get you up for work in the week and for whatever you do at the weekend. You can also set a one time alarm for a time in the next 24 hours. There are plenty of options for sounds (MP3s included), repeat intervals, auto-snooze and snooze delays. All in all it is a great little application, does exactly what is claimed for it and the cost is reasonable, particularly at today's $/£ exchange rate. If the experience encourages you to try other Spb apps you can get a discount on those as an existing customer. I hope you can tell, I'm really very impressed. Just to be clear, I have no connection with Spb Software except as a satisfied user of their product.

Just as a footnote if unlike me you've stayed loyal to Palm you can get pretty much the same functionality from Palmary Clock, which was one of the most used applications on my old TX.