Spb Software House have just released version 1.0 of the latest addition to their portfolio of applications - Spb Time.  As one of their beta testers, I have been fortunate enough to become quite familiar with this rather useful clock utility over the last few weeks and naturally decided to write a review of it.

Time is essentially a clock for Pocket PC devices but with the additional benefit of multiple alarms, five count-down and six count-up timers, world clock, screensaver and is full skinable.

When launched, Spb Time displays a simple and clean looking analog clock with four large tabs across the bottom of the screen (intentionally large enough for use by fingers). The first tab permits the user to switch between clocks and timer mode and to access the program options.  In Clock mode, the other tabs switch between analog, digital and world clock modes; in Timer mode, the tabs select the multi-day stopwatch, the count-down and the count-up timers. A single tap of the screen will hide (and show) the task bar and the tabs, leaving a very nice looking full screen clock.

Both analog and digital clock mode can also display markers indicating alarm times - these permit access to any already set alarms with new alarms configurable from a popup menu.  In digital clock mode, the time is shown in digits with the seconds and a current month calendar optionally also displayed.  The world clock displays a world map with the night shadow and city locations also optionally displayed.  The world clock can display the time in four locations and automatically adjusts for summer time variations, these cities can be configured either by selecting from the popup menu or by tapping the relevant city on the map. 

One rather nice feature of Time is that it is external power aware - when connected to the power it can be set to act as a screensaver.  This means that when the unit is placed in the cradle it can become a rather useful desk clock and calendar.  The screen saver can be configured with a list of application exceptions, when these app's are running the screen saver will not start - useful when running the likes of GPS software in the car.

Another feature of Time's clocks is that they are all fully skinable, both in analog and digital mode;  it comes supplied with four skins and a further five are available to download for free.

So that's it for the clocks, which only leaves the timers and stop watches, right?  Well, yes... only there's one multi-day timer, five stop watches and five configurable count-down alarm timers.

When in timer mode, the second tab is the multi-day stopwatch.  In common with all the timers it has a start and a reset button which become lap and stop buttons respectively when the timer is running. The timer lists all the lap times and splits beneath the main timer display and these can be exported to a text file.

The five count-down timers (tab three) are preset at 30 seconds, 1, 5, 10 and 30 minutes;  the can be set to count down from 23:59:59. Each can be configured to display a custom message and play any available ring tone on the device when the timer reaches zero. The five count-up timers (final tab) can each count up to 23:59:59 before wrapping round to zero and also have lap time support.

The timers are designed to continue operating when the program is shut down, though this is apparently subject to the behavior of Windows Mobile which doesn't always want to come to the party. On my Xda II the count-down and count-up timers restored fine on restarting Time but the main multi-day timer always reset to zero.

Spb Time is a very nicely presented, useful and well written application which fills yet another of the many holes Microsoft left in WM2003. At US$6.95 it isn’t costly and for anyone with a need for timing multiple events it is good value.  Alternatively you could always buy a few of the other excellent Spb applications and get Spb Time for free by redeeming your Spb Reward points.

Spb Time clocks up a timely 9.7/10