Night Stand HD Review

Night Stand HD is a customizable clock and alarm, focusing on a minimalist design that presents time and weather. There are eight different clocks to get you started: Analog, a custom-coloured analog time presenter; Binary, an advanced clock that presents the time in binary style; Classic LED; Flip; LCD, which is also colour customizable; Milk; World Clock, providing six different clocks in analog format; and Nixie. All clocks can be used in both portrait and landscape mode.

Although most of the themes present the same style of data, the styling and colour schemes are sufficiently different to warrant using them. For colour customizable themes, the choice is not limited to block colours, but rather an entire pallet. This is presented with a scroller, allowing you to choose the colour that most suits your taste.

All clocks present the time (in one format or another), weather in a specific city and can work as an alarm clock. The alarm features an optionally-enabled snooze button, at time periods of 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes. There are a number of in-built sounds which, in my opinion, are not particularly suitable or pleasant as an alarm clock with the exception of 'Spring.' You can, however, choose songs from the iPod application to ease you into your day a bit more smoothly. There's also the reverse of an alarm - music to put you to sleep (or to listen to while you sleep) - which will turn the app off at a customizable time of 5, 15, 30, 60 or 120 minutes after you close the settings menu. Global clock settings provide you with options to show seconds, the day of the week, when the week starts and whether or not you prefer 24-hour time. Night Stand HD also includes abuilt in stop watch with a futuristic but clean design.

Overall, I'm impressed with what Night Stand HD offers. However, I'd like to see a bit more from this application - like choosing colours by HEX code, the ability to display the date, and having colours that change throughout the day. Not all clocks are colour customizable when, in my opinion, they should be. Given the fact that this application is most likely going to be used at night, it was also surprising to see no brightness option. Most surprisingly, there is no quick way to have an alarm that repeats itself each day of the week - you have to manually add an alarm for Monday through to Sunday, and only then can each alarm repeat itself. Oddly, my evening alarms had their time presented in morning format (eg 0649 for 1849).

Nonetheless, Night Stand HD makes the iPad functional and useful even when you aren't using it. It's good to look at, easy to use, minimalist in its design and great for what it does.

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