I recently bought a new clock radio, the Sony Dream Machine, to wake me up in the morning for work. The ancient clock radio we had was thrown out in disgust because it was so irritating, and the buttons were not working properly from repeated frustrated beatings when I was trying to set the time.
The Sony Dream Machine is pretty standard looking, not that expensive, and has large green numbers that can be seen OK in the day, and are not too bright in the night.
It’s best feature is a small paddle switch with which you can adjust the alarm time up and down. So if you want to get up 15 minutes earlier one day because the CEO is coming to visit your office, you can easily adjust it and then just adjust it up 15 minutes, back to what it was the next evening. You don’t have to cycle through 24 hours, in minutes, all 1440 of them, like most other cheap clock radios.
Setting the time is the same. You can change the hours and minutes forward and backward, and not just in one direction, which is marvellous!
You can be woken up with a choice of either radio (fm and am) or buzzer, and you can switch the alarm off.
Another nice feature is that you just touch a button on the top of the radio to switch the radio on, and another button to switch it off. No horrible slider switches. This same button is used to switch the alarm off when it wakes you up. There is also another very large rectangular button to place the alarm into snooze mode, which gives you 10 minutes more sleep time every time you push it. If you push it twice in quick succession it will let you snooze for 20 minutes before waking you up. There’s a lot of common sense in this radio!
The radio has a small lithium battery for retaining your settings during power failures. It should last about 5 years.
It also has a daylight saving button, which adds an hour to the time, to place the radio in summer time mode.
I’ve bought quite a number of clock radios in the past, and this is the first one I’ve really liked. It really is a brilliant small machine, and whoever designed it has obviously place a lot of thought into it’s functions.
I’m very pleased, and no one is paying me to say this!!
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