It’s— ok. Almost.

The low resolution of the Earth Desktop doesn’t make it particulary useful for anything. When you add your city, the Earth rotates to a point where you might expect the city to be, but there’s no indication where it’s actually located. If there’s radar for the rain, I haven’t seen it. It’s pretty, but serves merely as a pretty desktop, not even a gimmick.

The UI isn’t particularly intuitive, but once learned, it’s— ok. One problem that cost a star all on its own is the inablilty to read the hours in the hourly view. For some reason the developer has taken Apple’s implementation of illegibly low contrast text to heart in only one area, those hours. It’s easy to see sunrise and sunset times. Anything in between is a guess at best, unless you crank up the brightness to 11. Then they become - fairly - legible, but the rest of the display is blindingly bright. Who can live like that? For me, the hours of bright sunshine is very useful information for planning my day, and I don’t understand why the Dev mad them so hard to read. It was a choice, and not a good one.

Given the expense of the app, I’m particularly disappointed. That cost another star.

PhoneGui about Living Earth - Weather & Clock