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Like most utilities, they’re either helpful to you personally, or of no interest whatsoever and unlike a game where extended play may change your opinion, it’s not really possible to create a need or adapt your life around a utility.  iZones (iTunes link) is a perfect example of this, as you either really need international time zone data or you don’t.

iZones provides time zone information for 270 cities around the world with AM and PM comparisons and details of whether daylight saving is in effect, all laid out on a logical manner.  A slider lets you check times over the coming few days too.  You can manually select the time zones that are most important to you, put them in order of preference and always have the information close to hand.

At this point, you know if iZones is something you’d find useful or not, so lets move on to what it’s like to use.  It starts up almost instantly and displays your chosen zones in a scrollable list with a day’s movement either side.  The neutral colored background is easy on the eye and the simple world map at the top of the screen adds some visual interest too.  iZones is landscape only and the only onscreen option is to add or remove time zones.

If time zones around the world is what you need, iZones provides it in a clear format that’s far more preferable to many of the annoying online options, making this a good choice for those who need to check times in other countries infrequently.  However, if a time zone calculator is something you rely on often, iZones little niggles may annoy.

For example, the scrolling of the list of times isn’t as smooth as you would want, making quick checks take longer than they should as keeping your eye on one of the zones becomes difficult, but this isn’t as annoying as the slider bar.  Lets say I want to see what time 10am Pacific is in Europe, well, I probably won’t be able to.  I may be able to see what time 9:52 am or 10:04 am is though, as the time you want to see directly relates to the time it is now and then moves ahead in four minute blocks.  Now, obviously this doesn’t make a huge amount of difference to its ability as a time converter, but why can’t it move in one minute blocks?

These are hardly make-or-break issues, but in an app where there is nothing else to do apart from check the time elsewhere in the world, they present themselves everytime you use it.

iZones does what one would expect and we have no reason to doubt that it will speed up the process of working out international time zone differences.  At $1.99 it’s priced at the lower end of the iPad range, but still seems a touch too much for an app that does one thing alone.  What we’d like to see in a future version is some kind of calendar integration, where you can schedule appointments or meetings from within the app, something we think would add considerable value.

Saying all this, the next time we need to check a time zone, iZones will be our first port of call, as it’s so much more user-friendly than any other option we’ve previously tried.

Overall: 3/5