Visual Timer for Kids & Adults – Digital Kitchen Countdown Timer with Progress Bar, Magnetic Timer for Cooking, Classroom, Study & Gym – 99-Hour, Adjustable Volume

An effective visual countdown tool
This visual timer is a modern take on the classic egg timer.It has the bonus ability to display the time when it’s not being used as a timer, which is pretty great. So it’s also a clock with a magnet on the back.This has a stopwatch like feature common to many wristwatches, but obviously isn’t a millisecond accurate lap timer.There’s a physical switch on the side for choosing the alarm volume that goes off once the countdown has been reached. Since all of the other configuration is done using multi-mode presses or hold of the face buttons, it’s nice that this important feature is not baked into another button.The countdown feature has 24 segments. This is great if you’re trying to count down 24 hours, or 24 minutes or 24 seconds. Otherwise, whatever value you’re counting down from, it will always get a full meter to start, and will empty one segment each 1/24 of the duration.The custom button is useful as a one-touch way to recall a single frequently used countdown and started immediately without having to initiate the start button as you normally do when setting a specific time. It’s like the plus 30 second microwave quick start button, but you can choose your own time value. You do need to be in the alarm setting mode to use the custom button. You can’t just press it while you’re in the clock screen mode. If you use this as a pomodoro timer, this could be pretty great. Once the timer has elapsed it will beep every second for 1 minute, at which point the timer automatically silences the alarm. At the end of your programmed time, it will begin counting up, so you know how long it has been since the timer ended. Unfortunately for pomodoro users, there is no way to take advantage of the count up at the end of the countdown unless you manually switch off the alarm using the switch on the side and remember to switch it back on.After canceling the active countdown alarm and going back to the alarm setting screen, I pressed the start button at 00:00:00 to let the stopwatch style count up function run for a little while to see if it would populate the progress bar, since I was hoping to count my time up rather than to count it down. An 8-hour progress bar to have going during my work day would be nice if it filled up rather than depleted. Unfortunately you can’t set a reverse timer, so I let it run for an hour and I didn’t see any segments appear. Since it effectively has a max duration of 99 minutes, 99 hours and 99 seconds, this theoretically would not fill up a segment until a little over 4 hours, which is pretty arbitrary. So impractical as to not be even worthwhile to test.The magnet on the back has a rubber coating which is nice so you don’t have to worry about scratching your stainless steel fridge as you might want to remove it from time to time. It takes 2 AAA batteries and it doesn’t require any screws to change them. It supports 24-hour time and 12-hour time formats. You just have to press the 1 hour button while viewing the clock switch views.Since there’s no way to change how long the alarm goes off before silencing itself, and there’s no way to set an end duration to a reverse timer, I still think that there’s room for improvement. The last thing I’ll note as a minor annoyance is that if you are laying the timer on a table face up, on its back, rather than looking at it head on, something affects the sound of the alarm and it becomes somewhat distorted. It still sounds like the alarm but it sounds worse. Like it’s scratchy or staticky. It also becomes muted because the speaker hole for the alarm faces the table. It’s much louder if it is sitting on the table upright then if it’s mounted to a surface or laying on its back.Otherwise it certainly beats the old school egg timer.I included photos which contain every page of the manual to help you understand how to set the clock and timer in case you lose the manual.