Lacking in usability and features for a paid appMar 03, 2013
By Me I'm always open to trying a new stopwatch/timer app, and I've tried several of them. My favorite timer program is Kitchen Timer, and best overall is Ultrachron. This app does have a stopwatch, and it does have a timer, but it does not add much over any other app.
The stopwatch does the basics - stop, start, lap, reset, and it show lap times for this run. The primary deficiency here is there is no history. Once you you hit clear, it's all gone forever. The on-screen buttons are sufficient and easy to hit, and you can use the volume control buttons if you'd like. There's supposed to be a "shake to start" option, but I couldn't get it to work on my Galaxy S3. Not that I could see that as being very useful, as the randomness at which it detects the shake would not lead to very good accuracy.
The timer is where it really needs work. First off, to switch to the timer, you have to go into settings, hit the checkbox and back out again. Typically you should be able to swipe back and forth, or hit a button on the main screen or something. Secondly, the timer start value clears after every run of the timer. Worst case here is if you want to run a 30-second timer over and over (like I do while playing games with the family), you have to do the following: 1. Either hit the timer numbers, hold down on the plus button for like 6 seconds, and hit okay, OR make a preset once, and then hit the preset button 2. Hit start and wait for timer to elapse. 3. Reset timer again
That is awefully tedious compared to just hitting start at the beginning of every round. The other should-be-useful feature is a voice announcement stating how much time is left. This is even a customizable amount of time, unless you want less than 10 seconds. For some reason there's a limit. Turns out for my use case (30 second game rounds), a 10 second warning is not much help, and more of a distraction.
Finally, the interface. Really? Is this ported from an iPhone or something where there are no hardware buttons? If you're going to design a system where I have to enter the menu to switch between modes, then at least let me use the "menu" button on my phone to get there. Instead you can only hit the little gear button which is located in the middle of the screen. On a personal note, I think the whole color scheme and fonts are ugly. Don't believe me? Let the timer run to "11" and tell me that is a nice looking font.
Conclusion: You can get better for free, and way better for paid. Don't bother with this one. Two stars because it does do what it says it will, just in the most tedious and ugly way possible.
213 of 272 found the following review helpful:
Feature-rich, but faulty?Mar 03, 2013
By CA Corino Read the high star reviews for an overview of all the features the app has- which are quite impressive for a "simple" stopwatch/timer app. Admittedly I have only used the app for a very short time, but have found major flaws in the statistics menu. A short test with 7 laps at around 2 seconds each, gave me the following statistics: fastest-2:07 slowest-1:87 (??) and average-0:05. Totally wrong results, thus making at least some of the praised extra features completely useless.
Again, this is only judging after a very short test of a limited part of the app. But if a "simple" app fails so miserably at one of the main selling points, I'm turned off immediately!
15 of 17 found the following review helpful:
FlawedMar 03, 2013
By tdl The app includes two functions- stopwatch and timer. Timer works fine, but stop watch seems to miscalculate laps, it said my slowest lap was 1 second when it was really 4. How can you trust an app that makes that mistake?
113 of 149 found the following review helpful:
good ideas, bad mathMar 03, 2013
By HueyBourbon Innovative controls. Bad average on the lap function. I tried 5 laps around 30 seconds each (longest being 33 seconds) and the average came out to 35... fix the function and it goes to stars.
146 of 194 found the following review helpful:
feature-rich and functional, but still needs workMar 03, 2013
By art When you think of a stopwatch and timer app, you probably don't expect it to have a bunch of features and options, but this one does. Some of the ones I think are pretty handy:
- it can automatically adjust the volume on your device (unfortunately it defaults to bumping it up to 100%, I guess expecting you'll use this in a noisy environment) - you can use your device's volume buttons rather than the touchscreen for the start/stop and lap functions - it provides speech and vibration updates of the time remaining in timer mode - you can shake your device for the start/stop and lap functions - You can play different sounds when the timer expires - in timer mode you can define presets to quickly choose them if you use the same times repeatedly
Now, it's not perfect. None of these are really enough for me to dock it a star though:
- defaults to 100% volume - defaults to voice prompts being on (kind of creepy) - display is attractive enough, but not customizable at all - phone's menu button doesn't do anything, instead you have to press the gear icon in the ui - it was not clear how to set the start time in the timer (tap on the time display). I instead chose to add a preset, which was more steps.
The only feature I really thought this could use was a widget. I don't really need a fullscreen display for something like this and the widget would provide handy access.
edit: after playing with this in a couple real-life situations I am reducing the rating for a couple of reasons.
1. The math on the lap averages is completely wrong. blech. 2. The settings revert to the defaults all the time. blech!!! 3. Ok here's a fun one. I started the timer and it was using the default 30 second voice prompts. I changed it to 1 minute because I didn't want it announcing every 30 seconds. I'm not sure exactly what it did -- it seemed to announce once a minute, yes, but it announced the same 30 second intervals, which were of course wrong. And then when my 15 minute timer went off at the right time, the voice kept on announcing -- every 30 seconds this time.
Also I agree with those who have suggested multiple simultaneous timers. Perhaps make that a special feature in the paid version, which might just make this worth buying.
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