defective design
I had an alarm clock many years ago that had a receptacle that I used to plug in a lamp.  When the alarm set time was reached, the lamp lit.  That's is basically what I wanted in this product.  The problems started with the lighting of the panel.  It is so bright, I could easily read by it.  It keeps me awake.  I've read that melatonin production is inhibited by any light source in the room.  I went to a guy who installs window tinting and got some scraps of dark tint material and put several layers on the face of the clock.  That helped, but then the clock face light quit altogether.  For me, that was a good thing, even though I could no longer read the clock at night.  I used a separate timepiece with a push-button light for that purpose.  The supposed sunrise simulation is bogus.  The designer has it step up in brightness, rather than a smooth gradient.<br /><br />Interestingly, the guy who gave me the tinting material told me that people like me come in routinely for the same reason.<br /><br />I'm an electronics engineer and have been programming lots of devices for most of my life.  I found this thing to be very complicated to program and the icons are very hard to see, even after I removed the tinting material.  When I'm sleepy and want to be sawing logs in a few minutes, the last thing I want to do is to start studying a new device, or try and remember the steps to follow to do something that should be really simple.  I haven't quite thrown it in the trash, but it's getting close.<br /><br />So, as a message to alarm clock manufacturers, consider building a device that does not unintentionally disturb your customer's sleep (what a concept!!!) by making it emit no light unless a button is pressed.  Make it a simple and cheap device that simply activates an external receptacle (15A) in a gradual way by using a D/A converter with more than 4 bits.  That's it:  forget the radio, the CD player, the tweety bird, the lamp.  I already have a lamp next to my bed.  If I could turn it on and off with a button on the alarm clock and have the lamp SLOWLY and GRADUALLY come up to full brightness in the morning with an option for an aural alarm (just in case), I'd buy it.  I want it so much that I'm considering building it.
Rating: 2 stars