I wouldn't exactly consider myself a world traveler, but I do spend a fair amount of time on the road, so I've always used a world time clock. When I first got my Visor, I was pleasantly surprised to see that City Time was built right into the ROM. With me in the U.S. and PDAlive.com in Singapore, I am able to keep track of the time difference whenever I want.

I was really interested to try Time Place when I was contacted by Class Action P/L to do so. Time Place is a world timer that also has a nice alarm clock built into it. It didn't take me long to realize that a travel alarm clock is one thing that I've NEVER remembered to take with me. Having a reliable alarm clock with me has proven useful on many occasions, and let's just say that hotel wakeup calls can be less than reliable. In the newest version of Time Place, a snooze alarm feature has even been added. Tapping the button at the bottom of the screen accesses the alarm. Setting is extremely straightforward, so there's no need for me to go into a long dissertation. One other thing worth mentioning though is that the alarm can now be set using Graffiti. Personally, I find that faster than scrolling through the numbers.

The first thing you will do upon opening Time Place is to select your default location. This can be changed at any time. Once your default location is set up, you will access Time Place's main screen. The four clocks can represent any city, airport, country, or time zone within the very thorough Time Place DB. The box encompasses your Home Location/Time Zone. To choose a city or time zone, simply tap in the small perforated box above the clock and choose the new city, airport, time zone, etc. from the Time Place Look Up. Once chosen, you will be brought back to the main screen with the new location and time displayed. This can be done with any of the four clock faces, however I have chosen to leave the upper left clock set as my Home Location. Whichever position you choose, the clock displaying your Home Location will be enclosed in a dark black box. If you find it annoying to look at a digital version of an analog clock, as I do, each tap on the clock face will take you from Analog, to Digital, to Military, and back. So you can even choose the display that best suits you.

Across the bottom of this main screen, you'll see Time Place has a built-in Lookup to help you find a particular location. Next to the lookup is the Alarm button, which we discussed earlier, and finally a bank of three buttons. The first button will always bring you back to the main screen. The middle button is a built-in Time Calculator, and the third button accesses every location in Time Place's Database. If you type a letter onto the line next to Look Up, you will be brought to this same list of locations. This is the entire Time Place Database. You can either use Graffiti to jump alphabetically through the locations, or you can scroll through them as you like. You'll notice that your Home Location is designated with a black diamond. You can even set and customize your exact location, or any city in the world for that matter, and it will be added to your Time Place DB. This is a quite useful feature if you can't find the exact city or location you're looking for. But bear in mind, you'll have to know time difference for that location in reference to GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time. You'll be asked to set the time differential from GMT, and the time in that zone will be automatically calculated. You can also set a Daylight Savings Time (DST), if applicable, for the new location.

While this alone makes Time Place an extremely useful app, don't think that this is where the functionality of Time Place ends. Another extremely useful tool is Time Place's built in Time Calculator. By tapping the middle button in the lower right corner of the screen, you will access Time Place's Time Calculator. The screen looks similar to the main screen, but with the addition of a plus/minus button in the lower left corner of each clock. Tapping this button will allow you to set a specific time and/or date at that location. When you tap OK, the corresponding time in each of the other three locations will be calculated for you, automatically. Pretty neat, huh? For example, if you need to transfer a particular file overseas at a specific time, the calculator will tell give you the exact time in your location to make the transfer. On a less serious note, I used the Calculator so that I didn't miss one second of live coverage of this year's Tour de France. In past years, I'd given up on trying to do all that in my head, where it takes Time Place literally seconds. I'm sure that everyone will have a use for the Calculator.