6 Cool iPhone Alarm Clocks
Good news for those of us who have trouble getting out of bed- alarm clocks have been becoming smarter. I’ve always had trouble getting out of bed, and recently I’ve started using my iPhone as a “smart alarm clock”. There are an increasing number of apps that harness smarter technologies to help us wake up earlier, and know more about our sleep.
Here are some of the most notable ones out there- I’ll write up the ones I think are the best, but have also listed the other options out there. Please leave a comment if I’m missing a good option out.
Accelerometer-based Bio-alarm clocks
Lexware’s Sleep Cycle
The first app which started it all, it has become one of the best selling apps on the app marketplace. Simple feature: it allows you to set a time, and then wakes you up in a 30 minute window when your body is naturally in the most wakeful phase- thus reducing grogginess. Also produces pretty cool sleep graphs from the movement data over the course of your sleep. Most importantly, it is well coded- it doesn’t crash in the middle of the night, and is reliable.
My main gripe with it (which motivates this blog post) is that it doesn’t include a snooze button (very important for me!). Also, it doesn’t fully harness its analytic abilities- it only allows you to mail out an image of the graph. Being able to export the movement data, and correlate it with other factors/study it over time would be very useful- a void many other apps are trying to do.
SmoothAlarm Pro ($4.99)
Somewhat like a Sleep Cycle Pro- it uses the accelerometer to track your sleep movements, but also includes a whole bevy of other features: a sleep diary, a snooze button, a ambient music player to help you fall asleep, the ability to pick a song from iTunes to use as an alarm. Most interesting: you can snooze with your voice (say “STOP!”), and you can track the weather and moon phases, to see how it affects your sleep.
Great idea and feature set- however most users complain it is buggy, often draining their battery or crashing in the middle of the night. Definitely a thumbs down, but great potential.
Absalt EasyWakeup Pro ($14.99)
a
It senses the best time to wake you up based on you sleep movements, sensed by the iPhone’s accelerometer. It allows you to snooze, and also pick the tune you use from both a preset list of sounds, as well as from your iPhone library- both features lacking in Lexware’s Sleep Cycle. Additional features: add annotations for each night’s sleep, and record awakening moods.
Notable mentions: Siesta Smart Alarm ($1.99), Smart Alarm ($0.99),
Microphone-based Bio-Alarm clocks
($4.99) This app is pretty much like Sleep Cycle, but uses the iPhone’s microphone to pick up movement/sound data. It is especially good for people who snore or cough, but is especially bad for people who sleep pretty silently, but move a lot. From user reviews, it doesn’t seem to work as well as the movement based alarm clocks covered earlier.
Sleep Analyzers
($1.99) Not your usual alarm clock, it uses behavioral tools to improve sleep, and get feedback on sleep quality. It’s best innovation is a stimulating game that measures morning grogginess- pretty useful in measuring sleep quality. Also, it has a very useful sleep diary which tracks average bedtime, average sleep time, and compares it to your score in the stimulating game. It lacks a bio-alarm clock, though, making it difficult to get any concrete sleep quality data.
($1.99) This app uses the microphone to track disruptions to your sleep- whether due to coughing or sneezing. It records sound that exceed a decibel threshold, and allows you to play over those disruptions to identify recurring disturbances throughout the night. It makes it easier for a doctor to analyze, or to tailor one’s sleep environment. It lacking an alarm clock makes it useless for me; however on a multi-tasking jailbroken iPhone it might be useful when run in the background with an alarm clock.
