An alarm clock is one of the expected features of a mobile phone and if your phone is running Android, there’s certainly a huge choice of applications to choose from to provide this functionality. My favourite is AlarmDroid and considering it’s free, it provides all the features you could possible expect in an alarm clock app.
Rather than making do with just one alarm, as is common with the stock alarm apps, AlarmDroid lets you have any number of alarms scheduled, each with their own individual properties. You can choose a ringtone from your phone to act as the alarm tone on a per-alarm basis as well as all the expected related options like vibration and volume. If you’ve got internet access and the data bandwidth to spare, you can provide an internet radio stream which will play instead of your ringtone. AlarmDroid can also create a countdown alarm, dubbed ‘power-nap mode’, which will activate after a certain period of time has passed.
Perhaps my favourite feature of AlarmDroid is the ‘Arithmetic Problem’ feature. When activated, the alarm will not deactivate without you first solving a simple arithmetic challenge. It can be torturing on those cold Monday mornings, but it’s often just what I need to pull myself out of bed and make sure I don’t just swing my arms in the general direction of the off button. AlarmDroid heavily promotes its “flip ‘n’ snooze” feature which allows you to deactivate the alarm by shaking the phone or turning it over rather than trying to find the motor skills to press the buttons on the screen. It works quite well, but I found that it can sometimes be a bit slow to react. Apparently this can be remedied by adjusting the accuracy in the options, but this didn’t seem to do too much for me. By using the text-to-speech feature in newer versions of Android, AlarmDroid can wake you up by telling you the time and weather which is a nice touch, but often I find that I just want to make it shut up and go back to bed.
The best part is that AlarmDroid is absolutely free on the Android market. There’s an option to donate if you want to support the developer but there’s no nagging screens in the application itself. If you’re finding yourself needing a little bit extra from the default alarm clock, AlarmDroid is well worth a try.