Flashlight by 7th Gear 3.23

A flashlight utility needs to be instant-on. Case in point, the people at 7th gear have created one such app that instantly switches on the LED flash on the back of your iDevice when you launch it.

Various settings can be found in the main UI, and the app is ad-supported, to put bread on the table for 7th gear. Let’s take a closer look at this simple, yet very handy utility.

Nice graphics for a simple flashlight app

Despite being one of hundreds of such apps, and despite iOS having a built-in flashlight utility accessible with a simple swipe-up in the Control Center, Flashlight by 7th Gear is in no way useless. First off, it actually has a pretty decent interface, with all the settings and toggles readily available for use.

It has a dark background with a faint yellow color theme for the text and buttons. The UI is not very contrasting, making very usable in low-light environments. A handy intensity slider sits at the top right side of the screen.

Instant-on, strobe, SOS

Its instant on nature lets you place Flashlight somewhere handy on your Home screen and just tap the icon for light. Many flashlight apps require one or even two more actions before the LED flash turns on. A flashlight app needs to be instant on, and we’re awarding this one extra points for this particular aspect alone.

The emergency icon causes the LED flash to blink morse code for SOS, which is always handy, but hopefully you’ll never have to use it. Strobe mode comes with a Hertz slider that lets you adjust the frequency at which the light pulses. Again, this is something that most flashlight apps don’t offer. A slider is always prefferable to presets.

Ad-supported

One thing we don’t like about 7th Gear’s Flashlight app is that it displays ads. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but it’s always better to make due without the annoying ad banners that keep spinning on the bottom of the display.

There’s an option to remove the ads via a one-time in-app purchase of $0.99.

Supports old iDevices and firmwares

Another good thing is the low firmware requirement. iOS 4.3 means everyone gets to download and use Flashlight on their iDevice, starting with the very first iPhones that had flash, and ending with the latest models. It’s also well optimized for most displays.

However, despite 7th Gear saying Flashlight is supported on iPads, it actually isn’t. It doesn’t have a dedicated version to support the iPad’s big display (natively), and iPads don’t have LED flashes on the back. So that’s a bit of false marketing right there.

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