Weather Radio

If the impact of modern life can be summed up through a single product, I think this little clock radio is that product.Clock radios used to be boring rectangular boxes that nobody paid attention to but everybody had. Kind of like a dad. In the US, they were made by all the same old white male-dominated companies that also made televisions and radios, plus Sony. The devices did what they were supposed to do, for so many years that one got tired of them before they stopped working.Flash forward past Nafta and the invention of the smartphone. Those old radio & TV companies are difficult to find anymore, and their products are no longer made in America. *Almost nobody* wants a clock radio anymore, because one’s iphone can awaken one in 25 much more pleasant ways than a radio or buzzer ever could. Everything is made as cheaply as possible, but ‘eye catching’ has become an essential attribute of digital electronics.Modern life clearly has its downsides. If you, like me, like to occasionally escape the tyranny of your smartphone, your dreams of escape probably include not allowing it to act as your social and business coordinator while you are trying to sleep. I “put my phone to bed” — and this is exactly what I tell my siblings and my boss when I do it — in the kitchen downstairs at night. But how am I supposed to wake up, what with no app to fill my room with the soothing sound of fake chirping birds?An alarm clock.I was excited at the notion of replacing the dusty old brown box on the bed-side; I read all of the positive reviews of this product and thought of it as one of those potential perturbations of a market that makes everyone happier. Like Uber, maybe! It was cheap and cute and multi-colored; what could be better? So what if I had never heard of the brand? If I couldn’t really even figure out what the brand was? It wasn’t going to be boring and straightlaced, like a dad!Well. It has occurred to me since buying this product that boring and straight-laced things have their upsides. They are, for example, reliable. This clock is not.A small round alarm clock looks cool, but when you try to actually interact with it, guess what it does? It either slides away, or it begins to tip & roll! This means that a small round alarm clock must be operated with *two hands*, which is pretty difficult when I’m half asleep and reaching over a husband or a dog to set it or turn it off. (The snooze button is conveniently on top, but that is the only easily-depressed button.)Setting this clock was difficult, but resetting the alarm was essentially impossible. The directions did not include this capability; I had to go online to find directions that worked, and guess what they were? (I’m paraphrasing, obviously:) Pretend you are setting the time. Exit that menu; then follow the ordinary (complicated) alarm-setting directions. This is a hilarious oversight, and if it *isn’t* an oversight, the makers of this clock appear to assume that people never change the time at which they wish to get up. Ever.Finally, there was the Mysterious Third Time. When I changed an alarm time, I had to start by pretending to change the clock time. I would push the ‘minute’ button — okay, there isn’t really a ‘minute’ button, but I would push the button whose job it was to change the minute — and it would show a time that was completely different from the current time. Even after I let go (either after setting an alarm or not), this Mystery Third Time would continue to appear, making me think I had accidentally changed the time. But if I waited, this Third Time would go away and the real time would reappear. I never figured that one out.Net: the above clock has been ‘put to bed,’ permanently. I have a boring, rectangular, dad-like black alarm clock that doesn’t tip over and is easy to operate. It has a brand name. And — one final reaction to modern life — I now read the 3-star and 1-star reviews before I buy anything off Amazon. I no longer trust the 5- and 4-star reviewers.

*******update****please see update below original review*****The buttons to set the alarm stopped responding within a week. The weird part is that they are the same buttons for volume and they worked for volume so something was wrong with the programming? I don't know. All I know is that it won't work anymore. Originally the directions given were wrong on how to set an alarm but thankfully someone else had the same problem in Amazon and asked the question and I was able to ge the correct directions. If you are looking for that scroll through the questions asked up above. Anyway once I had the time and alarm set I thought all was well but the time started to slow down. After a week my clock was 10 minutes slow and I decided to change it back and set the alarm again after turning it off for the weekend. No dice. Nothing worked. I even took out the batteries to reset the whole clock but it didn't help. Here is the funny part. 10 years ago I bought a fancy CD player alarm clock. I know, I know, I was so cool! Anyway, about a week later my toddlers decide that the CD player is a piggy bank and there is still 75 cents in there today. Yep they broke it. So I have endured a dumb buzzer for 10 years waiting for it to die so I could justify buying a new alarm clock. That dumb clock held out for 10 years until a few weeks ago it started to decide that some mornings it wouldn't go off. Not every morning, just some of them. HA! It was finally my opportunity to buy a new one! I researched online reviews and decided on this alarm clock. Oh man I was excited! BLUETOOTH! Fancy! And a charging station. Wow. It did so much I half expected it to make breakfast too. But during that first week would you believe that there was a couple days the alarm didn't go off? And then the buttons not working!!! Are you kidding??? No!!! I have waited so long! Why???? It is a cute shape though. And I like the lights.*****update****We were called by the company a few days after I made this review. CALLED somehow through Amazon. They offered to give us a new clock if we took down our review. We said no. We said that we would update the review after we got the clock and used it for at least a week to see if the new one worked. I keep noticing other one star reviews disappearing after a day or two. Be wary. Anyway. We got a second one and it was worse. I couldn't get the clock to even set the time. After a lot of work my husband finally got it working. The trick was to set it within 10 seconds of it being plugged in. Otherwise it wouldn't work. It would only change from 12 to 1 to 12 again. He also set the alarms and it seemed like everything was going great for a few days until one night the light decided it want to be on all night long. I kept trying to figure it out and shut it off but nothing would work until hours later of trying to sleep with the light on I unplugged it and chucked it across the room. That felt good. It is a good shape to chuck across the room. No corners to make a dent in a wall. As a alarm clock it is too complicated to figure out while you are groggy and awake. The best part was the Bluetooth speaker and the charging feature but I needed an alarm clock and this didn't fit the bill. Even though the company had called us many times to erase this review, I just can't.