Review: Pzizz Relax
March 29, 2010
Overview
Pzizz Relax is designed to guide you through a refreshing nap. A calming
voice guides you through your nap while enchanting music plays in the background. With an adjustable length, you choose how long your nap will last, up to 90 minutes.
A major claim to fame is that pzizz relax has a soundtrack that changes each time you use it. Pzizz technology limited is not a new company, they have been around for over ten years making relaxation and sleep soundtracks with much success.
Features
Pzizz relax is quite a simple app. You can adjust the time of your nap from 10 to 90 minutes. The meat of this app is the numerous different short 30 second to 3 minute tracks that play randomly. Each time you start pzizz relax, the same short track will prepare you for rest. The gentle voice will ask you to find a comfortable position, give you permission to ignore his voice, and prepare you to be awoken when your time is up. Allow your day to soften, close your eyes, then begin to relax! You are now prepared to begin listening to the body of this app. If you turn off suggestions in settings, you will hear the intro and wake upsection voice but no voice during the body of the nap. The body begins with a unique sequence of short tracks that will put you to sleep with music, voice, and binaural beats. Binaural beats are recorded using a method of recording that uses a microphone arrangement that is optimized for headphone use.
The music consists of gentle bells and fuzzy sounding gong sounds among other flowing sounds, which are for the most part quite relaxing. When your nap time is up, the voice will prepare you to start becoming aware, then the alarm sound that you selected will go off. You are now awake and refreshed!
The Good
The main power of pzizz relax is in the recording, not the app interface. On
e strength of pzizz relax is that when it is time to nap, the ideal set up is just having 1 button that says "start", and not a huge homepage of different tracks that overwhelm you with decisions. Too many decisions is where most other relaxation and sleep applications go wrong.
The ability to change the sound of the timer anywhere from the super abrasive Standard Beep sound to a relaxing Tibetan Bowl gives a lot of functionality to pzizz relax. You can assure waking up on a noisy time sensitive bus ride with Standard Beeps, or gently wake up slowly in your bed at home with the Tibetan Bowl alarm.
The music, sounds, and voice, come together in the soundtrack to make a super relaxing and personal environment which is near impossible to create on your own.
The Bad
Pzizz relax begins with the same recording for the first few minutes each time you use it, making the claim that you hear a fresh track each time a bit of falsehood. There can be long pauses of silence, which makes it seem like the short tracks are switching to the next. This silence can become distracting.
The alarm at the end of the time you set has no on/off setting, which means you cannot use pzizz relax to sleep for the night. There is however another app by pzizz technology limited, called pzizz sleep that does not include this alarm but will run you another $9.99. To enjoy the full effectiveness of the binaural beats, you must wear headphones. Wearing headphones is quite uncomfortable and might leave you with an ear ache when you awake. I have found after testing this app for weeks on myself and others, that it works just fine without headphones if you are in a comfortable setting.
If you don't give this app a chance, you might find yourself getting frustrated and not believing that it can work. It may cost time and persistence but this will put you to sleep if you let it work. Adjusting the music and voice volume is an important part of making this app personalized.
