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Saturday, June 28, 2014

Alarm Calendar; Best Android Alarm Clock App

In my seemingly endless quest to find the perfect Android Alarm app, I have a new champion: Alarm Clock Calendar. I won't provide a full review, that ground is pretty well-plowed. It has almost all the expected features that make smartphone alarm so superior to dedicated alarm clocks[1]. In addition, it has one vital missing feature: the ability to set an alarm, well in advance, for one specific, arbitrary calendar date. This is what I have been looking for.

NOTE: I am a feature maximalist when it comes to alarm clocks. Not everybody will want the complexity. If you don't find yourself wishing for missing features, stick with whatever alarm clock you have--perhaps the one pre-installed on the phone.

It has a couple of other notable features. One is really more than a mere feature, it is a new category of functionality: it shows you a calendar view, that highlights all your upcoming alarms. This strikes me as a thoughtful innovation. For me it is a nice-to-have, but I can see it being even more useful to some people.

The other nice feature is not only can you set an alarm for an arbitrary date, you can also create exceptions to repeating alarms. Again, can be very useful--for instance, to not sound on the Monday holiday. Then the integration between this feature and the calendar view provides some further value-add: instead of not showing alarms for the skipped repeating dates, it shows them highlighted in red, to call your attention to the fact that the alarm will be skipped.

The free version works fine, has minimally intrusive ads. But if you try this and like it, you should definitely support the developer by purchasing the $1.99 paid version

UPDATE 07/25/14: I still like it a a lot, but I have discovered two super-nice features from Alarm Clock Plus that I really miss. One is the ability to change the length of snooze, on-the-fly. I don't use this so much for morning wake-ups--too much effort, too dangerous--but more for reminder alarms. The other is to set "skip next occurrence". While Alarm Clock Calendar has a fine-grained way to set an arbitrarily complicated schedule of skips, it lacks this quick, super-simple way to set a one-off skip, for the very common use case of "tomorrow is an exception".


[1] One notable missing feature--no "math to snooze/dismiss" option. For some people this will be a deal-breaker, but I never use it. It also doesn't have a quick nap mode, and the UI isn't quite as nice as Alarm Clock Plus.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous05:35

    Hello! Nowadays individuals expect more out of their wake up timers than simply going off at the designated time. Indeed, even OEMs have overseen not to foul up the wake up timer apps that they have bundled with their gadgets. For a great many people they are absolutely acceptable.Thanks all!!
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    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for sharing best alarm for android really good and useful app for me.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Alarm Calendar was my favorite until I found the A.I Awake 2.0 alarm clock android 2017.
    In case you need so here it's the play store link :-
    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=alanhuert.aiawake.org

    ReplyDelete
  4. WakingNews Alarm Clock app
    WakingNews Alarm Clock is yet another beta app release with some potential. It functions primarily as an alarm clock. You set an alarm as usual and it goes off on time as usual. However, this one reads you the news from a variety of sources when it goes off. So it functions a little bit like old school radio alarm clocks. It has several good news sources, including Yahoo Finances, Yahoo Sports, Engadget, etc. However, there are some lesser sources of words there as well. Thankfully, you can choose the sources that play when the alarm goes off. It's in beta so there are definitely bugs. It is also free and has potential.

    ReplyDelete
  5. WakingNews Alarm Clock app
    WakingNews Alarm Clock is yet another beta app release with some potential. It functions primarily as an alarm clock. You set an alarm as usual and it goes off on time as usual. However, this one reads you the news from a variety of sources when it goes off. So it functions a little bit like old school radio alarm clocks. It has several good news sources, including Yahoo Finances, Yahoo Sports, Engadget, etc. However, there are some lesser sources of words there as well. Thankfully, you can choose the sources that play when the alarm goes off. It's in beta so there are definitely bugs. It is also free and has potential.

    ReplyDelete