Alarm Call

Clock Radios have been around for years. I’ve had a few in my time and the latest one incorporates a DAB radio, which is nice. However, for what should be a simple device I am always amazed that no-one ever manages to get these things right. Here are a few of my gripes:

I use clock-radios to wake myself up, so why are the damn things illuminated such that I can’t get to sleep in the first place? My latest one is just as guilty as any other I have owned. The clock face is supposed to dim, and it does, but I can still make out shadows from the thing. I’ve had worse and usually end up covering the clock with a book or something but why can’t the designers of these things switch off the illumination altogether once the alarm is set?

Why can’t you tell the time? My old clock radio had the irritating habit of gaining a few seconds each night. I set the alarm so it would switch on just before the news but over the course of a week I would be woken up earlier and earlier, losing a few valuable minutes of kip. I have “radio-controlled” clocks and even a watch which will automatically set itself so why couldn’t these be incorporated into clock-radios. Actually I think my new DAB radio will do this.

Wake me up gently. I did have a device at one time which acted as an artificial sunrise and would slowly illuminate the room prior to making some bird noises. This was actually a nice way to be woken but I tended to sleep through the bird noise. Wouldn’t it be easy enough to incorporate some sunlight friendly LEDs into the back of the radio?

… and gently off to sleep. Many clock radios have a sleep function but they usually switch off suddenly. Wouldn’t it be better to gradually fade them out? This might work well with getting young children off to sleep.

Thank God it’s Saturday. I know it’s my own fool fault but I sometimes forget to disable the alarm at the weekend. Wouldn’t it be better if the alarm could work this out for you?

Houston, we have a problem! As electronic devices go, clock radios are pretty simple, so why are they so damn hard to program in the first place? This may sound like ludditism but it shouldn’t be that difficult just to set the time that you want to wake up. My old clock-radio had the insane scheme of having the hours set by the right button and the minutes by the left. I could never remember this. The new one is a bit better but it involves repeated button pressing to determine whether hours, minutes, the DAB channel, the backup FM channel, the backup-backup bleeper or the second alarm is to be set. After all that I discovered that I had forgotten to set the radio pre-sets and ended up with static.

So far I like the new alarm but it will only have to go wrong once for me to suffer from insomnia as to whether it’s going to work or not.