HourPower is one of those little apps that sits in the corner of the Ovi Store, largely unloved. It is a ’single serving’ app – it doesn’t have a suite of capabilities and it doesn’t integrate with any social networks. All it does is one simple task – tell you the time. What’s that you say? You already have a clock on your phone? Ahh, but HourPower will actually speak to you and tell you what time it is, at the touch of a button. Sounds great but does it actually work? Check out our HourPower review and find out for yourself…

HourPower so could nearly have been a contender. The app installs quickly and pops up a dialog box asking to choose between ‘12-hour clock’ ‘24-hour clock’ and ‘Auto’. Umm.. not sure what Auto means.. lets go for ‘24-hour clock’ – we can always change it later, right?

This was the last time we ever saw that dialog box.

Once installed, the app quits. Hmm, we thought, suppose we had better run it again. “NINETEEN FIFTY SEVEN,” said our phone. We ran it again – “NINETEEN FIFTY SEVEN”. Ahh. That’s all it does – just opens, says the time, then quits. That’s actually brilliantly simple. We pressed again, “NINETEEN FIFTY EIGHT.”

Of course, we thought, we can just bind the app to a soft key or home screen shortcut. We can probably get it to run on startup using an app like PowerBoot. (”NINETEEN FIFTY NINE”) This is great!

“TWENTY O’CLOCK”

Ah. Right. Face, meet palm. The author forgot to tell the app how to properly pronounce the 24-hour clock. *sigh*  Oh well, let’s try the 12-hour clock instead, surely that must work correctly?  It was at this point that we realised that there was no way of running the app that would bring up the mode selection dialog. None at all.

A bit of Googlage revealed that the dialog only ever appears right after you install the app – the only way to change the settings is to uninstall the app, then reinstall it. The quick way would be to have the .SIS file stashed on a memory card, but If you are using the Ovi Store this is obviously a little more time consuming. This odd quirk – the fact that there is basically no graphical interface for HourPower – is the reason there is only one screenshot for this review. Sorry.

Anyway, while we did find learning how to use the app a little frustrating HourPower does at least do what it says it will do (albeit with a rather idiosyncratic interpretation of the 24-hour clock). It is worth a download, just for those times when having a speaking clock might be useful, we just wish a little more thought had gone into it.

Details
Price: Free
Size: 0.038 MB
DOWNLOAD: HourPower

Check out our Ovi Store: HourPower Review image gallery: