A big part of me wants to love the alarm clock Hilton’s hotels use. As you can see here it has a lot going for it. It’s somewhat attractive and attempts to distill an alarm clock’s functions down to basics. Great idea.
The execution is a little sucky, though. For instance when I first used it, I set the alarm by pressing “alarm set”, moving up and down through the displayed time, and then pressing “enter”. These buttons are even labeled 1, 2, 3 to show you how – nice and easy. When I woke up, I pressed “alarm off” to turn it off. Easy, again. But the next night I realized there was no apparent way to turn the alarm on! So I went through those three steps again.
Then later, on a lark, I pressed “alarm off”. Sure enough, it rotated through buzzer alarm, radio alarm, and alarm off. So yeah, that’s mislabeled.
Then there was the little daylight savings time change this past week. I received a note saying that all clocks had been updated. Great idea. Mine wasn’t. So I figured I’d adjust the time. But… there is no way. That’s right! You can’t adjust the time on the alarm clock. Apparently it’s radio-controlled. Again, that’s a nice idea… but sometimes, clocks just start to slow down and need adjusting.
Finally, the line-in for iPods and MP3 players is a nice idea. But it doesn’t control the thing, so I’d need to leave my iPod running and on repeat all night long for it to work! No thanks.
It’s a great idea, again, but the execution is just a little off. Too bad.
Posted in Consumer Commentary, Technology