Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmone of Nintendo’s most baffling yet delightful products in recent memory was announced and launched simultaneously on Wednesday, October 9th.
We managed to get our hands on one, so if you’re wondering if this unusual new device is worth the windfall $99.99 / £89.99 / $99.99 asking price, then you’ve come to the right place.
Note. We’re waiting to spend a few nights with it before giving a final score for this Alarmo review — plenty of time to discover our favorite themes and really put it through its paces (well, as much as you can put the alarm clock through its paces). In the meantime, we’ll cover the device’s design, initial setup, key features and first impressions to hopefully help you make an informed decision if you just can’t wait for our final verdict.
So, without further ado, let’s open the Alarmo box and see what we’ve got.
What’s in the box?
The box itself is pretty standard stuff: admittedly, it’s a tad smaller than we expected, and it’s completely crammed with text that, frankly, we don’t have the patience (or the multilingual skills) to read. Let’s just open this thing up.
After you’ve unpacked everything and thrown the box to one side, you’ll see that you’re left with:
- the alarm clock itself,
- USB-A to USB-C cable,
- and a tiny little fold-out instruction leaflet
We were a bit bummed about the lack of any kind of AC adapter with this thing. Yes, leaving out the power adapter has been common practice for major companies for quite some time, and Nintendo even removed it for its 3DS lineup after a while, but we feel it’s kind of necessary for an alarm clock.
Some homes these days have USB slots built into the wall, but these are still few and far between. So make sure you have a spare – any old 5V phone adapter with a USB-A port should do. If you have a spare cable to power the Switch dock, that should work just fine too.
Once you’ve placed the alarm clock in the optimal position on the nightstand, it’s time to set everything up.
Nintendo sound clock: alarm – design and display
Before we dive into how the initial setup goes with the Alarm, let’s take a look at the actual design and display for this thing.
Starting with size and weight, it’s about as big as you’d expect from an alarm clock, but arguably a bit lighter at 237g (the Switch OLED weighs 319g). Granted, once you have the thing on the nightstand, you probably won’t be moving it around much, but it’s nice that it’s so easily portable if you need to.
The two buttons at the top represent the ‘Back’ and ‘Sleep Records’ functionality. So basically, instead of navigating to the Sleep Records screen within the screen itself, a quick click of the button on the right will take you straight there. The buttons require almost no force, and make a nice, satisfying click when you do; similar to the volume button on the side of a high-end mobile device.
At the top you have a circular dial. This thing lights up when the alarm goes off and you can turn it left and right to scroll through menus, pressing down to confirm. The controls are extremely fast with very little lag, although there are some requests (such as entering your internet password) that feel a bit demanding.
On the screen itself, you have a 2.8″ color LCD screen and it looks fantastic. At maximum brightness, the background colors really pop, and you can easily set it to dim slightly if the motion sensors don’t detect any movement nearby (of course, the screen will also darken to the point where it is almost completely black at night).
With the always-on clock display, you’ll have themed fonts and characters depending on the game you’ve chosen for your alarm. It’s a joy to watch Mario and Link run and jump around under the weather.
Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo – initial setup
Setting up the Alarm is, predictably, very simple and very ‘Nintendo’, which means there’s a bit of fun to what’s otherwise quite simple.
Now we say it’s easy, but if you’re buying an Alarmo for a toddler, you should probably do the initial setup yourself before handing it over. There is nothing particularly difficult here, but you need to understand what type of bed is being used (single, double, king, etc.), as well as where the Alarmo will be placed in relation to the bed itself.
You are required to select your language and region before setting the date and time manually; once you go through the whole setup, you can connect to the internet and set the date/time automatically. Alarmo will then have you move from side to side and back and forth to properly calibrate the motion detection technology, during which Mario will run around grabbing coins to show you’re doing the right thing.
Once you’ve played around with the initial position, Alarmo runs the test, asking you to lie down in bed as if you were asleep while it plays random music to ‘wake’ you up. It asks you to get out of bed to stop the music, and if this doesn’t quite go as expected, you can change a few settings before trying again.
When selecting a ‘scene’ to use as an alarm, the device annoyingly doesn’t play any kind of music sample, so unless you’re very familiar with the games themselves, you won’t know what tune to expect until the alarm starts. However, each scene has a title and an accompanying image, so it’s pretty easy to tell what kind of music will end.
A quick note about the sound quality – it’s excellent. Granted, the volume won’t compete with the likes of the Alexa or Bose speakers, but it gets the job done considering how close you’ll be while you sleep. You can easily increase or decrease the volume using the wheel on the main screen, and the quality remains crisp and clear even at maximum.
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