By Evan Ackerman
Imagine if you will that it’s early in the morning on a weekday. Your alarm has gone off, and you’ve been hitting the snooze button over and over and completely lost track of time. The dilemma: do you open your eyes to check the time, even though you know it’ll break the snooze and force you get up? Or do you just assume that it’s not really too late yet and snuggle down back to sleep, perhaps missing out on something important like the rest of the day? The answer is Audocron, the audible clock:
All that’s required to find out the time is groping around blindly from under your blankets until you accidentally bash the Audocron, and then count the number of times it goes bing. As long as your half-asleep addition is pretty good, your eyes can remain safely closed. There are two potential problems with this clock: one is that aside from this specific circumstance, it’s a lousy clock, since not only do you have to touch it to get the time, you have to listen to as many as 26 bings. The second problem is that it doesn’t audibly differentiate between AM and PM, meaning that if you sleep like I do, you won’t ever really know what time it is without opening your eyes anyway.
$24.99 from ThinkGeek.
Nice! People will always make money from gimmicks as long as they can get them onto the market.
Is it that hard to make something like this with an actual electronic voice that just tells you the time?
Furthermore, why couldn’t they just install a motion detector with a very small detection area? Then by just sweeping your hand within say 6″ of the unit it tells the time? Or maybe a small remote that velcros to the headboard.
What I’d like to know is, if it doesn’t have a display, how do you set the (alarm)time?