Nightstand Central 4.1.4

Developer Thomas Huntington offers this neat app called Nightstand Central which goes onto any iPhone or iPad that’s running iOS 6.0 or later and turns it into an awesome nightstand clock with luscious imagery and additional functions, like shake to turn on the LED flash, or fading music to fall asleep to.

The app itself is great, but there are several factors that make it not so great when you start to actually use it. Let’s look at some of these aspects.

Impressive visuals

To his credit, Huntington has achieved a truly impressive design with Nightstand Central. Every element just shines, and the UI is really responsive too, unlike many other clock apps we’ve tested.

The background images are breathtaking, and the time / weather widget can be held down and moved anywhere on the display - for instance, if you don’t want it obstructing a particular image.

Extensive settings menu

For a clock app, it has a ton of settings to tweak. In addition to changing the backgrounds, you can name an alarm, fade in the sound, toggle vibrations on and off, enable auto-lock, and more. The settings menu also includes information about the clock screen gestures, such as swiping up and down for increasing and decreasing the brightness.

A constant-on app

Unfortunately, like most clock apps this one needs to be constantly on to work properly. Nightstand is probably best used with the iDevice sitting in a dock or a cradle. If you don’t dock your device, the app will stay on for as long as the phone’s battery will allow it. Surprisingly, it doesn’t drain the battery too much. But you shouldn’t rely on your phone waking you up in the morning if you leave Nightstand on with a 20% charge and no charger connected.

Tricky IAPs

Huntington isn’t exactly straightforward about some of the advertised functions, such as the flashlight utility and the fade-out sleep music feature. These are actually available only via in-app purchase. And they’re separate too. In fact, Nightstand has quite a lot of these hidden costs, and it’s something we frown upon.

Add to watchlist:

FlashlightClock / timer

• Alarm Clock Free for iOS 8 - Best Alarm Clocks with Wake Up Music 2.7
• FlashLight LED HD 1.51
• Ultra Utilities! + QR Scanner 6.2
• Timer+ 2.1.2
• Timerlist 1.1.3
• Wave Alarm 2.3.1