Getting up in the morning for some people is the worst part of there day. Hitting the snooze button time after time only prolongs the agony of getting out of bed. Luckily there is new alarm clock tech to help you snap out of bed in the morning!
You may be asking yourself why I even need an alternative alarm if its already convenient to use my phone. The problem is you lock yourself into a snooze button habit. Tech2U recommends the app Fred O’Clock that is free on iOS. The app is an alarm that has no snooze button, and to stop the alarm you have to play a memory game until the alarm stops. The free version comes with just the memory game but for $2.99 you unlock classic games from your childhood such as Play that Song, Mindbender, Space Attack, Submarine Hunt, or Catch that Comet. Engaging your brain in the morning can kick start your day and really gets you up and moving. If you happen to be an Android user the free App Mimicker can perform the same task.
If playing a game isn’t your thing Clocky might be the product for you. Clocky by Nanda Home is the alarm clock on wheels. If you dont get up, the alarm will roll off your nightstand and keep going, forcing you to get out of bed to turn it off. Clocky is durable and designed to safely make a 3 foot drop from your side stand. Clocky also has an option for a single snooze and can be found for $40-50 on Amazon.
Getting active quickly is the best way to get you up in the morning but what if you want to keep using your phone? The Wake N’ Shake app is referred to by the developers as a “merciless alarm clock” and lives up to its name. To get it to turn off, you have to shake your phone until the app fills up a special bar, and only then will it turn off. There are different alarm sounds and it also comes with a quick nap feature. The Wake N’ Shake app is a great way to get the blood flowing in the morning and costs a fair $0.99.
Sleep Cycle is a cool app that not only wakes you up at the ideal time, but can track your sleep patterns. The reason you wake up feeling great and other times wake up and feel awful is how deep of sleep you were in when you woke up. If you are in lighter sleep and your alarm clock goes off, you will feel a lot better than if you are in deep sleep and your alarm goes off. Sleep Cycle monitors what phase of sleep your in and attempts to wake you up at the best possible time in a gentle, pleasing manner. TechRadar, Wired and The Wall Street Journal all swear that Sleep Cycle actually works at graphing your patterns and waking you up feeling refreshed.
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Video Transcription:
Female Anchor: …somebody that probably has some really good information for us morning people.
Male Anchor: Well, did you hit your snooze button today?
Female Anchor: Oh, yeah, at least twice.
Male Anchor: We all hit the snooze button when we wake up, especially early. I hit it three times today. We’ve got our Ryan Eldridge from Tech2U to give us some alternatives because the snooze button is not always a great thing, right?
Ryan: No, you’ve got to get off the snooze juice. You can’t keep pressing that button. My wife is the same way, you know, she hits that snooze button over and over again. I’m somebody who kind of just gets out of bed. Well, we’ve got some cool alternatives to kind of wake you up. So here’s a cool app that you can get for your phone. I put it on my iPad so it’s a little bigger, we can see.
Male Anchor: Okay.
Ryan: So when your alarm goes off, normally you just press a button to turn it off. Well, here you’ve actually got to play a game of Simon in order to wake up. Is that cool? For about $3 you can buy different games, so you can have like an Alien Attack, or like, Hide the Submarine, and all kinds of weird little games you can play.
Male Anchor: So let me get this straight. I’m waking up at, well, you know, 4:00 in the morning, and the first thing I have to do is a memory game?
Ryan: Yeah, you play a memory game because what users are reporting is that it wakes them up and makes them alert really fast because you’ve got to turn on your brain to start doing it. Otherwise, you can’t turn the alarm off. So you can sit there and smash on it, but it won’t work.
Male Anchor: Okay.
Ryan: That’s kind of cool.
Male Anchor: That’s good.
Ryan: So another one is Clockee. This is a little gadget you can get. I’ll hold it up here. This is about $40 or $50 at Amazon.com, and as you can see, it’s got wheels on it.
Male Anchor: It’s got wheels.
Ryan: And so, it’s got an optional snooze button. So what happens is when it goes off, if you don’t have the snooze button alert set, what it will do is it will roll right off your side table and start rolling around your house.
Male Anchor: Okay.
Ryan: And you’ve got to chase it down to turn it off.
Male Anchor: That’s brilliant! That’s actually really smart.
Ryan: I, personally, I think that it would be a great thing for your guestroom. It would drive me crazy. I would have a hammer next to my bed and smash the bejeezus out of that thing.
Male Anchor: I might throw that against the wall and it would end up shattered in pieces the first day.
Ryan: So, another cool app that we’ve got here, this one wakes you up with a really annoying sound, and the only way to turn it off is to shake it.
Male Anchor: Oh, Okay.
Ryan: I saw you on your Facebook page the other day, you’re doing Shake Weights?
Male Anchor: Yes.
Ryan: It’s just like that.
Male Anchor: Oh, just like the Shake Weight. I’ll demonstrate then.
Ryan: So here. I probably won’t have time to get it to go off. But yeah, you just shake the bejeezus out of that thing and it will turn off. That’s the only way to turn it off.
Male Anchor: So I’m in bed and I’m doing this.
Ryan: Yup, and they have different levels, so…
Male Anchor: So I’m immediately waking up angry, immediately waking up angry.
Female Anchor: Can you change the sound?
Ryan: Well, I can, actually. Some of the sounds are really kind of funny. If I can get it to go back here.
Female Anchor: I’d love to hear how it sounds.
Male Anchor: Because I have one of those alarm clocks that, speaking of sounds, that starts off really quiet and then gradually builds up. That way you’re not… See that’s…
Alarm: Wake up, my beautiful sleeping beauty.
Male Anchor: Okay, so we’ve got a Spanish-themed alarm clock?
Ryan: But you can do Circus.
Female Anchor: Oh, God.
Male Anchor: Circus isn’t bad.
Ryan: But there’s different levels you can set it at. So I have it set at like Teddy Bear level, but you can also set it all the way up to like Impossible, or I’m Going To Kill Someone level. They have Pure Evil level.
Male Anchor: Right.
Ryan: So you’ve got to just really shake the heck out of the thing.
Male Anchor: Yeah.
Ryan: And so the last one I’ve got here is actually a sleep tracker, which is kind of cool. I tracked my sleep last night to see what it was like, and it turns out, I don’t sleep very well. What this does is it is uses the microphone in your iPad or your phone, and listens to the sounds in the room, and then it determines when you’re sleeping and when best to wake you up.
Male Anchor: The sounds of the room as you’re sleeping? So snoring, coughing, other things may be happening, depending on what you ate last night.
Ryan: It can tell whenever you’re moving around, you know, if you’re flipping around a lot.
Male Anchor: Got it.
Ryan: It knows if you’re not sleeping well. But it sets the alarm… You set it to like 5:00 a.m., right?
Male Anchor: Right.
Ryan: And what it’ll do is it’ll wake you up at the best possible time based on your sleep cycle.
Male Anchor: Genius! And then, these are all great tech items that we can find at the website, Tech2U.
Ryan: Yeah, you can go to Tech2You.com/blog. We’ve got them all listed there.
Male Anchor: Ryan Eldridge with Tech2You, thanks for coming in.
Ryan: Hey, you’re welcome!
Male Anchor: And the reason you couldn’t sleep well is because you couldn’t wait to be on this show.
