Comments: Our guess is that American Innovative is a company of engineers. Of course that's not a bad thing – it probably means their product is better than you expected, and quite possibly that there are unanticipated features. It just may also mean there's a slightly steeper learning curve than you expected.

The brand new Klip! Vibe is a combination dual-countdown timer, stopwatch, and clock that you can clip on your belt or apron and carry around the house, so that you never miss hearing the timer go off again. It can also stand on the counter or a shelf, and there is a magnet on the back (of which the engineers are particularly proud*), allowing you to stick it to the refrigerator.

Each timer alerts you with a beep, a vibration, or both, which continue for 60 seconds or until shut off. If you don't respond to the beep/vibration by the time it stops fussing, the timer will keep counting elapsed time, so that you know how late you are when you finally get to the thing being timed. The beeps for Countdown A and Countdown B are different, so you can tell them apart. Each timer remembers the last time you set (unless you reset it), so if you are timing the same thing over and over, you'll only have to set it once and restart it as often as you like.

Most timers require you to use one button to set the necessary time, sometimes resulting in too much scrolling. The Vibe uses three dedicated plus (+) and minus (-) keys – for hours, minutes, and seconds – allowing you to set your chosen time quickly and accurately. The clock requires you to deal with a sneaky button hidden on the back, which first compels you to choose between the 12- and 24-hour clock, and then lets you set the time using the toggle buttons on the front. There is a keypad lock function, which allows you to keep anyone else from upsetting your timers, and which turns itself off when a timer goes off.

The Vibe includes a stopwatch function, but you won't be buying it for that – it counts by whole seconds, not by tenths or hundredths, so your budding athletes will roll their eyes at it. Frankly, that's what will keep them from stealing it away from the kitchen, so that's probably a good thing.

There is subtle display of ten little bars across the top of the display panel (which you could easily miss), and which count down in increments to give you a visual indication of the percentage of total time remaining (if you set the timer for 10 minutes, one bar will disappear every minute, etc.).

The final element that makes us sure engineers were key to bringing this to market is that there is a little Phillips-head screw securing the battery compartment. You can just imagine the number of times a battery cover had unexpectedly come off in the engineers' hands, and them vowing that "that will never happen with any product I design!" The Vibe comes with two AAA batteries installed (and screwed down tight).

Another good thing about a company of engineers is that if you ever lose the modest instructions sheet and can't remember how to set the clock to standard time, you can almost certainly find it in PDF form on the company's Web site.

*The magnet is molded into the belt clip, rather than glued on, as is common with other timers on the market.