iMetro Dubai – iPhone app of the Week

So you’re riding the metro after a hard day’s work and you, quite naturally, fall asleep on the way home. Or heck, a late night tuck-in means you’re probably going to be catching up on some precious sleep on the way to work. So what do you do as soon as you board the metro line? Calculate in your head an estimated time of arrival, forcing yourself to focus and work out the numbers, set the alarm and hope for the best? What if someone’s already done that for you?

iMetro Dubai was designed specifically with this sleepy scenario in mind. The app simply shows you a list of metro stations where you can choose what station you’ll be riding from and to, and then hitting start once the metro departs. As your journey comes to a close, the app will remind you at 80%, 90% and 95% that your ride’s about to end. At completion you’ll hear one of those security alarms you hear in spy movies and stealth games blaring in your headphones letting you know your journey’s ended.

The whole interface is designed with simplicity in mind, as is the app itself. With just the option to select the starting point and destination, iMetro Dubai keeps your efforts to a minimal so you can concentrate on the more important thing: sleeping. The app also has the option to access your iTunes library, but that part seems underdeveloped since it only allows basic controls (previous/next track and play/pause) on top of which the library is only accessible in an alphabetically organized track list. However if you’re already running a playlist or album on the iPod, iMetro Dubai will allow you to control those songs.

A significant downside to iMetro Dubai is that if the iPhone is put in silent mode, the app will simply vibrate the phone once at the 80%, 90%, 95% and 100% intervals, nothing continuous, nor will the alarm actually go off. However, the biggest issue with iMetro Dubai is that it won’t work while multitasking, so if you hit the Home button while the application is running, the countdown timer will actually pause. This isn’t actually so much of an issue if you think about since you won’t exactly be multitasking on your iPhone while you’re sleeping.

In future updates it would be nice to see full access to the iTunes library from within iMetro Dubai along with the ability to multitask so the app keeps on running in the background, and of course new stations and updated times as the Dubai Metro network keeps on expanding. For what it is, iMetro Dubai serves its purpose well, if with a limitation or two, but until the next two weeks this app is going for free (later selling for $0.99), and as such that makes it our App of the Week.