Price:	€14.50		Reviewed by:	Neil Brown
Supplied:	pocketMax		Review date:	29/04/2006
Pros:	Phenomenally useful!- lets you set different alarms and options for multiple profiles Well-priced Highly configuable- loads of settings Billing support Automatic profile switching Easy-to-skin Today  plug-in Excellent support		Cons:	None

Introduction   Every so often, you come across an application which you’ve never noticed before- for some reason, you’ve just never seen a mention of it, nor had it recommended to you. phoneAlarm is one such application, and, for the life of me, I can’t understand why. I’ve been using phoneAlarm for a little over a week now and, frankly, can’t remember how I got by without it- if you have a Phone edition device, I really can’t recommend this highly enough! The beauty of phoneAlarm is that it just hits the nail bang on the head- it has a huge number of features, but all of them add to the overall product, making it something on which I’ve become reliant in the space of eights days.   phoneAlarm is a profile-based notification system, allowing you to configure how you are notified about different events depending on your profile selection. For me, this means that I can set my phone to ring loudly when I have “Home” set, more quietly when I am at “Work,” and to make no sound at all when I am in a “Meeting”, but still have the LED flash to notify me that I have missed something.   Profiles     And it’s not just phone calls which are configurable- you can select different settings for SMS, MMS, email and missed call reminders, meaning that you can configure your device so that it works best for you. The main incentive for me in trying this was due to a failure in my push email software- for some reason, it is not possible to configure the native software to notify me when a new email is pushed in, which largely defeats the point of a push system. phoneAlarm overrides your “Sounds and Notifications” settings, using its own setup instead, and, for the first time, I heard a satisfying “ping” when an email arrived. I don’t propose to mention each and every setting which can be adjusted in phoneAlarm, as that would take far too long, but, suffice to say that you can set different sounds for different alarms, as well as different “repeat” settings, call forwarding options, radio profiles (on / off by default), backlight settings (on power, off power).. the list just goes on and on, and it took me a couple of days to get everything set up to how I wanted it, and, even now, I am still tweaking bits and pieces- the backlight settings are of particular use, as, for example, I never want the backlight to go off in the car, whether on power or battery, but, at home, I want the device to shut down very quickly when it isn’t doing anything, whether on power or not… so easy to configure, and yet so convenient in operation.     You can copy profiles across, so, for example, I never want my radios (other than GSM/GPRS) switched on by default, but did want to tinker with all of the sound and backlight settings, but still found it easier to set up one profile, and then copy it across to all of the others, so that the radio settings were correct, and then adjust the sound settings individually. You cannot copy individual settings across, just entire profiles, but it remains a useful option.   Of course, it’s not always convenient to have your phone making a noise- an LED is far less intrusive in a meeting, letting me know that I have a message or email waiting, but without disturbing everyone else in the room. However, it’s not just meeting where notifications aren’t particularly polite- I work in an open plan office, and, although I thought it was initially great that there was a “ping” when I received a new email, I soon realised that, if I were sitting in front of my PC, I didn’t need the sound –the email would hit both my phone and my PC at the same point, and so I’d know about it. What I really needed was a profile which was silent for email when I was at my desk, and a separate one for when I was working away from my desk- easy!   Today plug-in   phoneAlarm is not an audio-only application, though – it is all run from a Today plug-in. My plug-in is skinned to fit in with Juni’s Black and White theme, and, as you can see from the screenshot, I can tell at a glance whether I’ve missed a call, how many SMS / Email / MMS I have waiting, as well as controls to turn on Bluetooth, headset, Wifi and GPRS. In fact, I can pretty much control all the communication functions from this one bar- including accessing a recently-dialled numbers list, enabling call-forwarding, as well as changing profiles and muting the entire system. Different skins show different information, and the downloadable skin builder makes it reasonably easy to build your own skins- you just need to provide suitable images with the correct names, and select where you want them to sit in the plug-in, and the rest is handled by the software. For example, if you didn’t want the Bluetooth icon, you could get rid of it, or, if you wanted the two signal meters elsewhere, it’s a simple matter of moving them.   Automatic profile switching     phoneAlarm can also “sniff” settings from your phone and from your network, displaying your signal coverage and battery levels (and can trigger an alarm if you fall below a certain % level, so that you know when your phone is out of signal / battery), your network (particularly useful if you are roaming, and have to connect to a particular network in order to use your inclusive minutes / get a cheaper rate), and, most impressively of all, in my opinion, the cell to which you are connected. This is a great feature, thanks to phoneAlarm’s automated profile switching system. Using this, you can have a profile trigger when your phone connects to a certain cell (or one of a range of cells)- thus, there are three cell sites covering the campus on which I work, and, by adding these to a list in phoneAlarm’s settings menu, I can have my profile automatically change to “Work” when I connect to one of the cell sites. Similarly, when I get back home, my profile is automatically updated to “Home”, based on my cell site settings. It may be a small touch, but, frankly, it’s a touch of genius- there’s no point in setting multiple profiles if you forget to change them as appropriate, and, having the machine do it for me is brilliant.  In addition to the cell-based profile switching, you can also have alter your profile setting based on your calendar status- this is set through the Profiles screen. You can change your profile based on Outlook's <busy> and <Out of Office> settings, as well as by your own categories- for example, if you have a "Business" category, you could have your phone automatically switch to your "Work" profile when it was time for an appointment in such category. Similarly, you can also switch appointments based on time- so, if you want to have your notifications reduced in volume at night time, you could set up a rule to do this- for example, switching to "Meeting" at 22:00, and back to "Home" at 05:30, in time for your morning alarm- for me, this meant creating a category of "Work- Meeting", as opposed to simply "Work", so that I would automatically adjust to the "Meeting" profile at the correct time, leaving it on "Work" when I am just at my desk. When you combine cell-site, calendar and time awareness, you have a very powerful tool, which, with a bit of fune tuning in the way that you tag your appointments, can almost mean that you never need to adjust your profile manually.   You can have your cell site (or, once you’ve configured your location settings, your location (“Home”, “In the Office” etc- whatever you want)), own number, operator, data usage etc scroll across a section of the plug-in- I’ve disabled this feature, as I don’t want to give up the extra few pixels of screen space, but, if you wanted to keep an eye on how much data is being transferred, for example, it could be a very useful feature.   Billing     Similarly, if you have a price plan which lets you have [X] amount of free minutes, and then charges you, you can enter all this data into phoneAlarm, and it can calculate the cost of your calls, SMS etc- I have to admit that I haven’t really explored this, as I use my business SIM in my phone, but, if you need to keep an eye on things, phoneAlarm offers a very convenient way of doing this- and the settings available look to be very comprehensive indeed, including minimum call costs, fixed monthly fees etc, so you should be able to fit your individual price plan into the software.   Conclusion   Basically, I can’t praise phoneAlarm highly enough- for €14.50, it’s an outstanding program at an outstanding price, in my opinion. I was going to write that I would have thought it wise for Microsoft to try and incorporate phoneAlarm into the Phone Edition OS, but, then I decided that I’d rather they kept their grubby little fingers away from it, and left the application in the hands of the guy who developed it, and continues to develop it so well. I had a couple of problems setting up phoneAlarm (entirely my own fault, I should add – not problems with phoneAlarm), and the support I received was first class- my faith in independent developers keeps increasing when I come across guys like Bruce! If you’re looking for something which will switch profiles quickly and easily (even without you being involved), with massive configurability and well-thought out options and functionality, I recommend phoneAlarm most highly.