Globo comes across as a really nice idea housed in a sleek, modern interface, but taken as a whole it’s not quite fully baked.
At its core, Globo’s a world clock, and you can define a list of locations, each of which displays its parent country and local time. Colored bands represent daylight, from a pale peach sunrise through to a deep red late afternoon and a mauve nighttime. The banded effect is clear in its minimalism; however, the white text isn’t that easy to read on the yellow backgrounds used for early morning, and, bafflingly, the clocks are always sorted alphabetically so if you like having your world clocks listed by time-zone like all banks and travel agents, you’re out of luck.
The clocks look fine but can’t be reordered.
Fortunately, Globo has further tricks up its sleeve. Tap on any location and you’ll see its time-zone, whether or not daylight savings is in effect, and the time in relation to your reference location. Smartly, any location can be redefined as the reference point, meaning even if you’re based in New York, you can easily enough find out how far ahead Sydney time is to London, assuming you’ve defined relevant locations within the app. The four-icon toolbar that appears when you tap a location provides access to further useful tools. There are details regarding latitude, longitude and the distance from the reference location, and you can set alarms. The latter of those features might just be Globo’s smartest: if you work with clients worldwide and someone asks for a meeting at 10am their time, you can use Globo to set that alarm; if a relative lives overseas and they’re home from work around 8pm their time, you can set that alarm. It’s a very intuitive system, and beats figuring out your own equivalent local time for such events.
You can set alarms using the time of each location.
A bit more polish and Globo could become best-in-class on iOS. The foundation is there, as is the style, but even in its current state, with some suspect color choices and fixed clock positions, it’s worth considering if you regularly need to contact people who live around the globe – especially given the low cost.
