Why aren’t you built in: Better alarms

All About Symbian just posted an article titled "The Perfect S60 3rd Edition Alarm"

The biline reads: There are many features that S60’s own Clock application lacks, but what are these features exactly, and are there any third party apps that can provide a better alternative?

The S60 clock application is pitted against the S60 calander, Alarm Pro, and BestAlarms. I was very disappointed to see Handy Clock left out of this comparison.

I highly recommend you guys check out that article if your are as serious about setting yourself reminders as I am. I also recommend the guys at Nokia (NYSE: NOK) to take a look at this.

3rd party clock applications were created because there are deficits in the feature set of S60. I’m not saying you should put developers out of business by taking away their ideas, but some things really are just common sense and make you go "Why wasn’t this built in?!"

Here are some things that Krisse and the All About Symbian community think should be added:

S60’s "Clock" does need beefing up, however. Here’s what’s needed to turn Clock into the perfect alarm app:

• Alarms that let you choose whether to use sound, vibration or a flashing screen to alert you, or a combination of two or three.
• Repeated alarms (for example the same alarm every day, or a work profile where you get woken at a particular time every weekday but not at weekends)
• Allow alarms to go off on particular times on particular dates, at particular intervals (weekly, fortnightly, monthly), and in patterns that have no set interval (for example the first monday of each month).
• Multiple alarms
• An optional more active alarm system which makes sure the user is 100% awake before it stops ringing. This could be done by forcing the user to enter a particular code, or a particular name, or even solve a simple mathematical problem. This would put an end to the phenomenon of users switching their alarms off while half-asleep, then waking up hours later with no memory of the alarm even going off.
• An optional much more soothing alarm which eases the user awake by activating the radio or MP3 player with a particular station or playlist. The proper alarm could also then go off a certain amount of time later, once the music has done its work.
• Have a default snooze time, but also allow the user to set how long the snooze time is for each alarm, in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and months. This setting should be accessible both when the alarm is set and when the snooze button is first pressed.
• An optional "nanny" alarm where you tell the alarm application how much sleep you need that night, and when you wish to wake up in the morning. It will then alert you when it’s time to go to bed, based on all this data. This feature could also be set to activate over an entire working week, with a graph at the end of the week displaying how much sleep you’ve had compared to how much you should have been getting (based on your age, etc).

I’ll say it once, I’ll say it again: The Palm (NSDQ: PALM) PIM is liquid gold. Learn from it.