Nov 28 2005
TreoAlarm review
[tag]TreoAlarm[/tag]After getting my Treo a couple of weeks ago I have been on a quest to find quality software to put in my toolkit, which has been an interesting adventure as I have never owned a Palm device before nor have I ever owned a PDA phone.
After taking care of email with ChatterEmail (push email at that!), a RSS Reader with Quick Newsand a SSH client with pSSH I started thinking of what else I was missing. My first thought was that there was no easy way to check the weather on my Treo, sure I could fire up Blazer and check a website like Weather.com but that is just way too bothersome.
A Google for “treo weather” led me to TreoAlarm, at first I was like why would I want to get my weather within an alarm clock? So I passed by it and continued my search but I couldn’t find any other decent looking weather applications so I thought I would give TreoAlarm a try.
TreoAlarm is an Application that provides a replacement for the Treo’s inbuilt pathetic excuse of an alarm, with my last phone being a s710a I was quite used to being able to set recurring alarms for certain days of the week, which was really handy to get me up for work and not wake me from my beauty sleep on the weekends but on the Treo that single alarm just was not cutting the mustard.
TreoAlarm fixes this and gives you up to a maximum of eight different alarm schedules, where you can set the time of day and the days of the week the alarm will sound. You can have the alarms be silent or choose from one of the built-in Polyphonic tones (possibly others that you add but I haven’t explored that yet), additionally you can also set it to turn your Treo’s wireless on/off, update the time (assumedly from a central server or maybe just from your carrier) and whether it should disconnect from the internet when done.
You can also set how long the snooze time will be, hang on a minute…. Wasn’t I looking for a weather application? Well what I neglected to mention was that there is also an option to update the weather forecast with each alarm, so what does that mean? It means you can awake and have the weather forecast right there at your finger tips and on the screen even! What a wonderful concept, have the weather ready for you when you most frequently want it!
You can choose from retrieving weather forecasts from the US National Weather Service, Yahoo Weather or the Canadian Weather Service, personally I use the US National Weather Service and by entering my post code it is returning details from a local airport. Once you have setup your weather service then the main TreoAlarm screen displays the current time in large type along with the details of any alarms you have enabled plus the current weather forecast complete with icons (although the icon for current weather doesn’t seem to display for some reason) and you can scroll through the next 7 days of forecast information.
The main screen also has a button to update the weather forecasts and another button that takes you to the alarm setting area where you can quickly enable/disable alarms and add new or edit existing alarms. Getting back to the alarm settings just quickly I forgot to mention that you can also set how long the alarm tone should sound, how often it should repeat, how long of an interlude there should be between each repeat, vibrate on/off and the minimum volume so it can gently wake you up by starting soft and getting louder.
All in all I have been quite impressed with TreoAlarm and highly recommend it whether you want an application to have weather forecasts at your fingertips, an application to provide a much better alarm clock than Palm’s bulit-in one or both then you can’t go past TreoAlarm. The only cons I have found with it is that there doesn’t seem to be an option to use MP3’s for the alarm sound even though I have Ringo installed at the moment and that an icon doesn’t display for the current weather on the main screen.
PS. I was intending this to be just a short and sweet review but for some reason I really got into the spirit of reviewing, something I haven’t done since the days of 3DfxOzStyle.com so stay tuned for future reviews of Treo software and accessories as I have been bitten by the reviewing bug!
I forgot another con but it isn’t directly related to the TreoAlarm application but rather the TreoAlarm website, if you let the page and stylesheet load entirely in Blazer then the website is impossible to navigate as the menu squishes up and each menu item is stacked in the same position.
I’d expect a website for a Treo application to be viewable on the Treo as personally I like being able to install applications on the go when I might not have my laptop with me in order to sync.
Wow, that is an insane review. I read the whole thing even though there is a good chance I will never own a Treo.
I highly recommend getting a Treo if you are in the market for a new phone or PDA, I am extremely happy with mine.
Now time to work out what is up with Wordpress not recognizing that this article has comments…
I was getting ready to mention that to you. And about the phone, I am a broke college student. Needless to say, I won’t be buying much for at least a few years.
Yet another reason for me to keep working on typo.jasonbainbridge.com (I’m just converting across now for a trial run).
Then once I can put together a theme then I am seriously thinking about switching…