Good concept, implementation needs improvement

I give them four stars for the concept.

However, I take away a half-star because they dont give you an obvious way to determine what alerts youve already seen without actually reading them. I take away another half-star because they dont let you set the level at which you want to be alerted, or the distance from your designated location from which you want that alert to fire.

For example, I dont want to be alerted any time there is a 5.0 or greater earthquake anywhere in a 5000 mile radius, but I would want to be notified if there was a 9.0 earthquake anywhere in a 5000 mile radius, with appropriate smaller radiuses for smaller quakes (i.e., any quake within a 100 mile radius that is a 6.0 or higher). Unfortunately, with POM Alert, its either off or on, and you have to take the distances and alert warning strengths that they provide.

The app hasnt been updated since May 2010. Thats an awful long time for an iPhone app.

I would give them another half-star if they fully and properly supported the iPad, and had Retina-quality graphics for the iPhone 4. They would get another half-star if they let me select multiple locations, with optional alternative levels of sensitivity and distance.

It would be great if they could include a wider array of different types of alerts and a wider array of different sources of information (for example, wildfire notices for California are posted on a different website than the one they currently use). Ideally, that would also include user reports for certain types of events, such as traffic accidents or roads being blocked. Thinking even further forward, they could even allow you to get push alerts based on your current GPS location, which could be really handy for those highly localized issues like traffic problems.

Meanwhile, Im looking at other location-based alerting applications.

BradKnowles about POM Alert, v1.0