Big Clock Roundup

Keith Waclena

What's the most surprising omission in the builtin Palm Pilot applications? The lack of a clock. You can display the time in the builtin Datebook by tapping on the date tab at the top of the screen; this works in DateBk3 as well (although not under PalmOS 3.5). You can also see the time in the Preferences app. But there's no clock application that displays the time and provides alarms and the like. (The Visor provides a builtin version of the shareware CityTime app, but Palm users don't have even this.)

This document describes several clock apps that I've been evaluating and reviewing for a couple of months in my quest to find the perfect clock. There are about a million clocks for the Pilot out there so I've narrowed the field to those that meet my initial requirements:

Large, attractive, readable time display, which, in my cradle, will serve as a deskclock. The more customizable the layout, the better. Note that just because I'm using my computer as a clock doesn't mean that I think that simulated LED digits are a good idea. In fact I think they're really ugly.
At least a few world time display options (so I can see the time of a city to which I'm travelling, or that of the home city of someone I'm corresponding with).
A database of world time zones and DSTs, so I don't have to look up this info in an Almanac (seems to me that this is the whole point of having a clock which is a computer!).
Alarms that make the clock usable as a travel alarm; this means I need:
- Several alarms that should be easy to turn on and off and reuse from day to day.
- Alarm sounds that are loud and obnoxious enough to wake me up (this goal might not even be attainable if not for the somewhat louder alarm on the Palm V and Vx).
- As an inveterate snoozer, I need a flexible system of snooze alarms.
- Decent `event management': it should be easy to see what alarms and snoozes you have scheduled for the future, and easy to delete them. (I evaluated one clock on a recent trip and found that it scheduled dozens of snooze alarms to go off every 10 minutes after I woke up, and then gave me no way to turn them off! They were still going off while I was eating breakfast!)
- It should be easy to `silence' all alarms, snoozes and timers, without cancelling them, for when you're at the symphony, say, or touring a Gothic cathedral. This is a trickier requirement than you might think, since most of these clocks ignore the system alarm volume setting! The ability to have a `silent alarm' is a plus (i.e., the alarm still pops up a dialog if it goes off when silenced); it's nice if you can have the backlight come on when the alarm goes off, with or without the silent feature.
- The alarms should be easy to set. I really hate the builtin PalmOS clock-setting widget (hereafter referred to as the Hateful Alarm-Setting Widget®): the one in the Preferences app that requires you to tap a digit and then tap an up- or down-arrow to change that digit: tap tap tap oops overshot it tap tap dammit! wrong direction! etc. I realize this may be just a quirk of mine, but hey, I'm the one writing the reviews!
  
  It should be easy to set a `relative alarm', by which I mean an alarm to go off a short time in the future. At the very least this means you should be able to see the current time when you're setting the alarm! Those of us who no longer have any short-term memory find it annoying when the alarm-setting dialog obscures the current time. Also nice is an option to set the alarm time to the current time, which you can then modify. Also see Timers, below.
  
  (My ideal widget would allow (but not require) graffiti, provide a numeric keypad,mui require minimal tapping, make it impossible to enter an invalid time, and make it hard to set an alarm that isn't actually going to go off -- I didn't find an app with this ideal widget, but a couple came close.)
A calendar (optional) is a nice touch. At the very least the current day and date needs to be displayed.
Support for several countdown timers. Alarms just don't cut it as timers: you shouldn't have to do arithmetic to time your parking meter, or various dishes that you're cooking, for that matter. The most important feature of the timers is this: they have to work when the device is powered off! This would seem to be a no-brainer, but several clocks require you to turn off auto-off (i.e. to leave your device on) or else the timers will sleep until you turn the device back on. This is a real battery-burner. There's a technical reason for why the programmer might be tempted to implement timers this way, but that's no excuse.
A stopwatch. For accuracy, it should be operable with the hardware buttons, as tapping tends to be inaccurate. Multiple laps and splits should be supported.

A word about timers and stopwatches. A stopwatch is really not that important to me, and you can get standalone stopwatch apps for the Pilot -- but it is a nice feature of a clock and would save money. A timer is likewise not essential for the same reason; on the other hand, I haven't yet found any really acceptable standalone timer software.

Then there are the twin issues of price and size. Naturally I want to minimize both, but in my evaluations, features come first, and price and size don't play a role in my rankings. They will play a role when I ultimately choose to buy one.

You may be wondering, why not use DateBk3 for your alarms? Well, this is a pretty good question: DateBk3's alarms and snoozes are really good, better than those in many of the clocks I reviewed. But something bothers me about using DatBk3 as a travel alarm clock. Partly it's that I don't want my alarms cluttering up my archival databook database, but mostly it's unexplainable. Your mileage may vary.

So, the clocks I chose for evaluation basically had to have a big, visible time display, some world time support, and decent alarms suitable for use as a travel alarm clock. This allowed me to reject scads of clocks right off the bat. If I missed any candidates, let me know.

Summary

Click on the clock name to jump to the detailed review.

Rank	Name	Price	Size	Evaluation
1	Clock+	$14.95	98K	Best looking display; great alarms and excellent snoozes; huge time zone database; usable timer.
2	Clock III	$24.95	66K	Good looking display; awkward but workable alarms and snoozes; decent time zone database; usable timer; excellent stopwatch.
3	Cesium	$7.00	42K	Good looking display; decent (loud!) alarms and snoozes; minimal time zone database; usable timer.
4	multiClock	$10.00	27K	Decent display; usable alarms and snoozes; minimal time zone database.
5	ClockPro	$12.00	49K	Ugly but readable display; awkward alarms and controls; no time zone database.
6	Big Time Pro	$10.00	46K	Decent display; barely usable alarm; decent time zone database.
7	Big Time	FREE	10K	No alarms, so useless to me.
8	Time	$8.00	34K	Last place ranking due to bug which renders alarms unusable; with a fix would get a higher rank. Ugly but configurable display; no time zone database; no timer.

Clocks Sorted by Price
Clock	Big Time	Cesium	Time	Big Time Pro	multiClock	ClockPro	Clock+	Clock III
Price	FREE	$7.00	$8.00	$10.00	$10.00	$12.00	$14.95	$24.95

Clocks Sorted by Size
Clock	Big Time	multiClock	Time	Cesium	Big Time Pro	ClockPro	Clock III	Clock+
Size (K)	10	27	34	42	46	49	66	98

Detailed Evaluation

Name	Price	Size	Demo Issues
Clock+	$14.95	98K	Annoying delay on startup and anytime the About screen is accessed; demo expires after 14 days.
Display
Main display has a large local time display, and a smaller (but still big) world time display; four world-time buttons take up the middle of the screen. The world time display can be replaced with a calendar of the current month that takes up the bottom half of the display. The time digits are non-LCD and are the most attractive I've seen, due to the font used and the fact that they're antialiased greyscale (or color on a Palm IIIc). Display of seconds is optional. Time format used is in accordance with system preferences.
World
One world time is displayed, with the day of the week and the numeric timezone offset from UTC. Four customizable world time buttons are on the main display and change the displayed world time with a tap.
Zones
An extensive database of over 300 countries and 1,000 cities makes home and world time selection a snap; daylight savings start/stop dates are included in the database and DST corrections are automatically applied to the world times. Clock+ will prompt you to change the device time when DST changes for home time. The time zone list is not editable, which would be a bigger deal if the builtin list weren't so extensive..
Alarms
Supports an unlimited number of named alarms. Each alarm can have a repeat that schedules the alarm to reoccur every day between specified start and end dates; specific days of the week upon which you don't want the alarm to sound can be specified. If you want to save an alarm for later use, but not have it go off until you turn it back on, you can do this by turning off all days of the week; I think this is awkward and would like a feature that made it easy to toggle an alarm on or off, but this is a minor complaint as the functionality is there. Absolute alarms are especially easy to set due to the use of a popup numeric keypad. However, relative alarms are hard. This isn't a big failing as it's easy to use the countdown timer for this purpose. A helpful feature makes it easy to specify on which day the alarm will go off. There are a dozen alarm sounds to choose from on a per-alarm basis, including some MIDI melodies that don't do much for me; but the builtin OS 3.x alarms provide a perfectly adequate selection, since you can specify the number of times to repeat the alarm and the interval between repeats. There are four volume levels plus a nice ascending level that `ramps up' from quiet to loud. You can have the backlight come on with the alarm, but you can't specify backlight alone for a silent alarm (Clock+ ignores the system alarm volume setting). When an alarm or snooze goes off, two big buttons are displayed, one to turn off the alarm and one to snooze it; the determined snoozer can change the previously programmed snooze time at this point if they're awake enough to wield the stylus.
Timer
Clock+ has a single timer that counts up or down; when counting down an alarm goes off at zero. This timer alarm will go off even when the device is off; all features of the regular Clock+ alarms can be applied to the timer alarm. The timer is very easy to set, for times less than an hour; if you want to time, say, a movie that is listed as being 114 minutes long, you'll have do the math yourself and convert to hours and minutes; sure, it's simple arithmetic, but what if you make a dumbass mistake? Having only one timer is a big disadvantage for some purposes, such as cooking.
Stopwatch
Clock+ has no stopwatch per se; the countup timer can be used, but it doesn't support laps and can only be started and stopped with the stylus, which means low accuracy. It's only accurate to the nearest second, anyway. Also remember that you can't be using the countup timer if you happen to be using the countdown timer.
Other
All Clock+ events can be listed simply by tapping the clock face. Events include all alarms, snoozes, and the timer. From this list you can easily delete any event. Nothing's worse than a runaway alarm or snooze that you can't figure out how to turn off; it's much easier to manage these with Clock+ than with any other clock software I've seen. There's also a shortcut to delete all snoozes.
Pros
Great looking clock! Extensive world time database Extensive DST database and home time DST change prompts Excellent alarm and snooze handling Excellent event management
Cons
Needs multiple timers No stopwatch At 98K, Clock+ is the biggest memory hog around

Name	Price	Size	Demo Issues
Clock III	$24.95	66K	Undetermined.
Display
Display day, date, and home time in AM/PM format in large digits; world day, date and time in small letters, and the nearest alarm. This display is not customizable, except to change the world time zone. The home time display is not LCD-style and is large and attractive. Only 12-hour display is supported, and there's no way to turn off seconds.
World
One world time can be selected; the display is in the normal Palm font and hence quite small. Date and day are also displayed.
Zones
Time zone database has over 400 cities, with daylight savings time start and stop dates. DST adjustment for world time dislay is automatic. The time zone list is not editable.
Alarms
Clock III supports nine alarms. Only one alarm sound is supported, with a programmable duration in seconds and three volumes; fortunately, the single alarm sound is a decent one. The alarm can be set to go off only on a particular day of the week, but you can't select a set of days -- it can either go off every day or just on Thursdays (say), but not on (say) weekdays only. Setting an alarm is particularly awkward: you have to both tap a digit and then type graffiti to change it. The alarm can be set to world time instead of home time but since I feel it's essential to change the device time when travelling I don't find this feature very useful. The snooze duration can be set on per-alarm basis. You also have to set the number of times you want the snooze to repeat. This strikes me as really weird: how do I know tonight how many times I want to snooze in the morning? My natural reaction to this is to set the snooze count to 99, but since there's no way to see how many snoozes you have left, this is awkward: all you can do is use the command to turn off all snoozes. To turn off the alarm, you can tap anywhere on the display; good when waking up dull-witted, but there's no way to have the backlight come on automatically to make it easy to see what time it is.
Timer
Clock III has a single countdown timer, with three volume levels and a programmable duration. The timer is set with the same awkward tapping/graffiti combination as the alarms. A bug in earlier versions of the software caused the timer alarm not to go off when the device was powered off, but this has been fixed in the current version.
Stopwatch
The stopwatch is probably Clock III's best feature. It's accurate to a hundredth of a second and uses the hardware buttons for start, stop and lap for accuracy. However, only one lap and split are recorded.
Other

Pros
Attractive basic time display Good stopwatch
Cons
Really awkward and counterintuitive snoozes Only one timer Lack of display customizablility Expensive and yet also sizable

Name	Price	Size	Demo Issues
Cesium	$7.00	42K	Start-up splash screen and delay.
Display
Moderately large home time digits, non-LCD, with large day and date, small day numbers, week number, and moon phase icon. 12-hour only, seconds always displayed.
World
One world time display, small, in default Palm font with day and date.
Zones
Small list with not much more than one city or region per time zone; not editable. Confusing daylight savings time option: I'm not sure what it does!
Alarms
Three alarms with optional daily or weekday repeat. Alarm can be toggled on and off and hence saved for future use. Brief text description. Current time is obscured when setting alarm! Alarm sounds are not per-alarm. There are ten custom sounds, some of which are extremely obnoxious (that's a good thing), with programmable repeats and durations. The backlight can be set to strobe when the alarm goes off, and since you can turn off the alarm sound, this allows a nice silent alarm. Unfortunately, it's extremely easy to forget that you've turned off the alarm sound -- the program ought to warn you when you set an alarm and the sound is off. I guess I could get used to this problem. Snooze is also not per-alarm, and can only be set to 5, 7, 10, and 15 minutes. Practically speaking, this would suit me fine, but why not allow a little more control? There are menu options to cancel the snooze and turn off all the alarms. Setting the alarm is done with the default PalmOS timeset widget -- tap a digit then repeatedly tap up/down arrows; I hate this widget.
Timer
One countdown timer. Annoying way of setting the timer, by tapping the upper or lower halves of the digits. The timer doesn't work when the power is off, making it essentially useless. While there's a control to turn off the device's auto-off, this is a dangerous battery burner.
Stopwatch
Cesium has a stopwatch with a resolution of a hundredth of a second. It has five laps, but tapping the lap button is very inaccurate: it's easy to miss the button and tap on the screen instead, which is how you turn off the stopwatch! It's also easy to accidentally double-tap the lap button, resulting in two laps.
Other

Pros
Nice silent (backlight) alarm Great alarm sounds
Cons
Too easy to set an alarm but leave the sound off Useless timer Marginal stopwatch Minimal time zone / cities database Minimal and confusing DST support Hateful Alarm-Setting Widget®

Name	Price	Size	Demo Issues
multiClock	$10.00	27K	Initial nag screen at launch time.
Display
Attractive large non-LED digits; day and date in small bold letters. Optional LED digits. 12-hour time with seconds only. DST must be set manually. Somewhat crowded but attractive uncustomizable display also shows world time, moon phase, and three alarms.
World
One world time and date is always displayed on the main screen.
Zones
Database of 24 world time zones is uneditable; no DST data (DST is manually selectable).
Alarms
multiClock has three alarms that are always displayed on the main screen, each with a checkbox, which makes it easy to save all three alarms and turn each of them on and off. Most alarm parameters, except snooze (see below), are configurable on a per-alarm basis. Setting the alarm is done with the Hateful Alarm-Setting Widget®. Active days of the week are fully configurable via radio buttons. Each alarm can specify a customizable message, number of rings, pause between rings, alarm type and alarm sound. The alarm type allows a silent alarm (which can use the backlight in combination with the global backlight option) and a weird option to lock the device (!). The current time is obscured when setting the alarm! The snooze delay is only settable globally (ie the setting affects all three alarms) at 1, 5, 10, 15, and 30 minutes (only). When the alarm goes off, the buttons on the screen aren't as big as they could be -- they're easy to miss with sleep-induced thumb-fingers, and there's plenty of room on the screen to make them bigger. Also, space is wasted on this screen with both `off' and `on' buttons as alternatives to `snooze' -- I guess `off' turns off the alarm for later, while `on' leaves it on for later: I don't think it's really important to make this decision the instant one is waking up. There are 10 alarm sounds, one of which is the builtin default. A few of these make perfectly suitable alarms; there are also four `tunes' that I couldn't see myself using. As for event management, tapping the time on the main screen pops up a dialog showing the next alarm or snooze, but not all scheduled alarms.
Timer
None.
Stopwatch
None.
Other
Extra panel in display shows any one of battery voltage, Swatch Internet Time, or countdown. The countdown shows the number of days remaining until any date of your choice. Moon phase panel on main display shows moon phase icon, age of moon, and date of next full moon.
Pros
Attractive display despite crowding and lack of flexibility
Cons
Less than ideal snoozes Hateful Alarm-Setting Widget® Minimal time zones database No timer No stopwatch

Name	Price	Size	Demo Issues
ClockPro	$12.00	49K	Periodic, random nag screens that really interfere with evaluation.
Display
Really gigantic but ugly LCD time display. Nice display options: seconds, day and date, world time, timer, and alarm displays are individually configurable on each of the three panels (clock, timer, alarm).
World
One world time display with optional seconds for three possible locations.
Zones
None: user must specify place name and UTC offset for each of the three possible world times. No daylight savings support.
Alarms
Only one alarm. You can select which days of the week the alarm will be active and repeated on. This is weird, because it does double duty for controlling whether or not the alarm is active, so it's far too easy to set an alarm for the wrong day. Setting the alarm is strangely difficult, requiring a menu selection (or command stroke) plus another tap from the resulting dialog box before you even get started. There's no way to see whether or not a snooze is set to go off, so it's easy to find one going off when you don't expect it. The extremely annoying shareware nag screens, which always pop up if ClockPro is running and you turn the power on, make it very difficult to get a feeling for what it would be like to really use the alarm.
Timer
The timer doesn't work when the power is off, making it essentially useless. While there's a control to turn off the device's auto-off, this is a dangerous battery burner. Setting the timer has the same advantages and disadvantages as the alarm.
Stopwatch
None.
Other
Has chimes for a variety of time periods (hourly, etc), restrictable to certain days and hour ranges, with several chime sounds. Has optional audible ticking, individually controllable for both clock and timer.
Pros
Big visible display
Cons
No time zone or daylight savings database Bad event control Useless timer Awkward alarm setting No time zone database Ugly LCD digits

Name	Price	Size	Demo Issues
Big Time Pro	$10.00	46K	No annoyances.
Display
Large non-LCD time display with optional seconds; 12-hour only; also day and date.
World
Bottom half of screen displays either two or four world clocks with day and date. Tapping the airplane icon on a world clock will change the device time to that time; very useful, but a moot point for DateBk3 users.
Zones
Database of 140 cities, with daylight savings time start and stop dates. The database is editable: you can add your own cities, or remove or edit the provided ones.
Alarms
There's one bare-bones alarm with a short text description, and you can set the active days of the week. The alarm can be toggled on and off and hence saved for future use. There's only one alarm sound, the PalmOS default, and the repeats aren't controllable: this would never wake me up. Worst of all, there's no way to tell whether or not you have a snooze pending. Setting the alarm is done with the default PalmOS timeset widget -- tap a digit then repeatedly tap up/down arrows; I hate this widget. Current time is obscured when setting alarm!
Timer
None.
Stopwatch
None.
Other

Pros
Cheaper and smaller than some
Cons
Only one inflexible alarm No way to control pending snoozes No timer No stopwatch Hateful Alarm-Setting Widget®

Name	Price	Size	Demo Issues
Big Time	FREE	12K	None.
Display
Large non-LCD time display; no seconds; 12-hour only; also day and date.
World
Bottom half of screen displays two world clocks with day and date.
Zones
Database of 50 cities; no DST data (you can check DST on and off for home and both world cities). The database is editable: you can add your own cities, or remove or edit the provided ones.
Alarms
None. This is show-stopper for me; I only reviewed this one since it's the free version of Big Time Pro, above.
Timer
None.
Stopwatch
None.
Other

Pros
Hey it's free!
Cons
No alarm! No timer No stopwatch

Name	Price	Size	Demo Issues
Time	$8.00	34K	Extremely subtle and very occasional polite reminders.
Display
Big LED digits for main time display, flexibly changeable with simple taps between 12/24 hours and seconds/no seconds. Day and date (in several tap-customizable formats) are displayed in small bold letters at the top of the screen. A configurable calendar display, world time and alarm details are all also optionally displayed.
World
One world time is displayed in moderately large LED digits on the main display (no date is shown). You can alternate between any of seven world times (plus Swatch Internet Time), with a tap, the up/down hardware buttons, or automatic cycling. From the preferences, you can also turn off the world time display.
Zones
There is no time zone or DST database. You have to fill in your own city/zone names and GMT offsets manually. Of course this means that the time zones are all editable.
Alarms
Time has three alarms that are all visable in a hideable display at the bottom the of the screen (the next alarm can also be displayed at the top of the screen). Each alarm specifies the time, a message, an on/off checkbox, and active day of week radio buttons. The checkbox allows alarms to be saved for future use and easily toggled on and off. The alarm display is very neat. Time provides only the PalmOS builtin alarm sounds. Setting the alarm is really troublesome: you just edit a field using graffiti or the keyboard. Just make sure you don't make a typo! (Oops, deleted the colon! Oh well, I didn't need to make that flight anyway...) There is no snooze per se; a global configuration lets you specify how many times the alarm will repeat and at what interval (rather like the `snoozes' of Clock III). I'm not quite sure how these work, because in testing it I got a fatal exception right when the `snooze' was scheduled to go off! (While it's true I run with a lot of hacks, this is very surprising and not acceptable. No other clock I evaluated crashed on me.)
Timer
None.
Stopwatch
None.
Other

Pros
Nice configurable display Cheap and lightweight Nice app for the money; with a bug fix and a little more work, this would be a competitive clock.
Cons
Ugly LED digits No time zone/DST database Useless snoozes which crash my device! No timer No stopwatch

Lame Technical Excuse for Timers that Don't Work When the Power is Off

If you implement the timer by looping, sleeping and waking up every second or so to check the timer, your app will just get paused when the device is turned off. As soon as it's turned back on, the code will check the time and notice that the time has expired, and then go off -- but this may be hours after the target time. The lame fix for this problem is to defeat the device's auto-off while the countdown timer is running, at the expense of burning batteries.

The only thing a PalmOS device can do when it's turned off is check alarms. PalmOS only allows each application to schedule one alarm. A countdown timer isn't naturally an alarm, but clearly you can turn it into one by just doing a little arithmetic. This is the correct way to implement a timer.

I've heard the excuse that PalmOS only wakes up to check alarms every minute, and so if you implement timers as alarms you could be off by as much as a minute. This strikes me as bogus, as an average thirty seconds of inaccuracy is probably not going to bother anybody if the device is powered off long enough to interfere with the dumb timer implementation. Anyway, you can always provide the auto-off defeat as an additional option for those who need split-second accuracy on their timers, even if the timers are implemented as alarms.

This page last updated Tue May 2 19:12:17 CDT 2000.