Can I just be honest about something? Alarm clocks are so way behind the times and I wish they would catch up with the technology that is out there. Thus, the reason why I started the search for a good alarm clock app to use on my iPhone. I really didn’t know what exactly I was looking for, but I wanted something that was a heck of a lot better than the digital alarm clock that I had in my room.
I decided to give out the iHome+Sleep app a try to see if it could actually work as my regular alarm clock. It has a ton of features, some of which that I felt were useful, and the best part of it all was that it was free. And to make it even better it’s a universal app, meaning that it was optimized for both my iPhone and iPad. Want more? Hit the jump to find out.
Navigation
When you first get to the home screen there really is a lot going on. At the top, you can set the weather for your current city and see the weather for the next couple of days. In the middle, you see the current time and a music button, which tells you what song will be playing when you get up in the morning. Then below that, you see a slider with either Bedtime or Wakeup. This slider functions as a way to log your sleep, which the app does a good job of helping you monitor.
Home Screen of App
Alarm Settings
When it comes to setting an alarm on this app, there is no shortage of options. You can set it for a specific time and a specific day, but you can also set an alarm for a nap as well. The difference is the nap alarm is set by alerting the app that you want to wake up in a certain amount of minutes, instead of a specific time. Your other options are to have the alarm repeat during specific days of the week, and you can also set a snooze duration.
You are also given some sleep and wake options to choose from. You can choose music to sleep to and the option of when the music should go off as well as music or an alarm sound to wake up to. The one thing that I couldn’t quite figure out is that it seemed like I couldn’t pick a certain song to wake up to — I just had to go with whatever song was picked for me. I tried to search throughout the settings for this option, but saw none.
Some of the settings for the alarm
Another nice option in the alarm settings is the reminders. You can set a reminder for yourself right before you go to bed or when you wake up in the morning. For example, if you don’t want to forget to take out the trash in the morning, you can write that as your reminder and you will get a push notification in the morning when your alarm goes off.
Creating reminders for bedtime or when you wake up
And of course, no alarm setting is complete without some social media aspect to it. From within the app you can tweet out or send out a Facebook post about the time you are going to sleep or the time you are waking up.
Social media options
Stats
A cool option in this app is the stats that are collected. They range from how many snooze cycles to the hours of sleep that you get. You are also shown your average hours of sleep and the amount of hours you have slept since using the app previously. The last stat you will see is the sleep and wake time for each day that you use the application.
Sleep Log Features
Other Cool Features
There are a couple of other settings that are worth mentioning. You have the option to change the home screen background with images that are in the app or pictures that you have. The second feature is what is called Overnight News. If you set up your Twitter and Facebook on the app you can get the option to view your tweets and Facebook posts that you missed while you were sleeping. That’s a handy feature to have.
Tweets from overnight
Conclusion
As you can see, the app itself is packed with lots of features. The best part of all is the fact that the app is free and it’s also a universal iOS app. It is worth mentioning that the iPad app looks nice and has the same features as the iPhone app does.
Overall, this is a very solid application. If you are looking for an alarm clock app that packs in some great features, then this is the one for you. At the same time, I can see how the many options could overwhelm someone who wants a simple alarm clock app, but for the low price of free, you really can’t go wrong. My advice is to try it out and play with it for at least a week, then make a decision if you like it or not. I know at first it was a little overwhelming for me, but the more I used it, the more I liked it and the extra features that it provides.