  A construction of covariant quantum phase observables, for Hamiltonians with
a finite number of energy eigenvalues, has been recently given by D. Arsenovic
et al. [Phys. Rev. A 85, 044103 (2012)]. For Hamiltonians generating periodic
evolution, we show that this construction is just a simple rescaling of the
known canonical 'time' or 'age' observable, with the period T rescaled to 2\pi.
Further, for Hamiltonians generating quasiperiodic evolution, we note that the
construction leads to a phase observable having several undesirable features,
including (i) having a trivially uniform probability density for any state of
the system, (ii) not reducing to the periodic case in an appropriate limit, and
(iii) not having any clear generalisation to an infinite energy spectrum. In
contrast, we note that a covariant time observable has been previously defined
for such Hamiltonians, which avoids these features. We also show how this
'quasiperiodic' time observable can be represented as the well-defined limit of
a sequence of periodic time observables.
