Thanks to the App Store, your iPhone can be used to replace a lot of other items. Forget cookbooks, newspapers and maps- your iPhone can replace them all. Well, sort of.

Night Stand aims to plug the gaps left by the limitations of the iPhone's built-in clock to make it a suitable replacement for a bedside alarm clock. You see, while the standard clock is fine for setting alarms, you wouldn't want to look at it for too long.

This app remedies this by offering six clock fascias designed to look like real-life alarm clocks, all of which are a good deal better-looking than the built-in clock. There's several different varieties of LCD display-style clocks, an old-fashioned flip clock and even a binary one. The latter took us a fair while to actually decipher, but it'll suit those with apartments stuffed with white walls and brushed aluminium appliances.

Of course, if you leave most apps running without any input, your iPhone will soon revert to standby mode, which would be a bit useless for an app like this. Night Stand overrides this function, keeping the app going even if you just leave it to run for hours. However, you can customise Night Stand so that it lets the iPhone go back into sleep mode after a certain length of time.

Leaving the app running will obviously have a pretty serious effect on the battery, even after dimming the backlight, which you can do with a simple double tap on the screen. Because of this, Night Stand is most suitable to use if you've got an AC adaptor or simple dock to keep your iPhone's battery topped up, especially if you're going to leave it running overnight.

There's an alarm function, so if you can keep your iPhone juiced up, it's perfectly fine to use as your morning alarm. There are eight different tones you can wake up to, from the relatively peaceful-sounding birdsong to the downright disturbing scream.

The alarm feature is simple, with just a single one to program and no option to make it leave out weekends, as you might find on a dedicated alarm clock. It does have a snooze function, if you're among the 99% of people that find it a little tricky to get up in the morning. It's a pity you can't wake up to any of your own music though.

Unfortunately, the alarm uses the standard volume setting to determine how loud the alarm is. So, if you're on silent mode, the alarm just won't sound at all. It's often easy to forget when you've put your phone on silent, so it's a pity the perfectly do-able volume override feature hasn't been implemented.

Nevertheless, considering the iPhone's standard alarm is perfectly functional, the appeal of Night Stand is much more in its aesthetics than the minutiae of its more involved features. Although a flawed app, it scores well on this core front.