Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Waking Up: Amazing. 10am wakeup to 07:20am. And I don't wake up cranky as **** either. To be blunt, I got fired from a job because I wouldn't wake up and I was having no success waking up earlier no matter how much I wanted to - this thing is a career saver for me. Hardware: Everything is done well. - The night light puts out a soft sleepy light that's bright enough to read by but makes me sleepier rather than more awake like a lot of lights do. - The radio speaker puts out soft sound that's relaxing to listen to (in contrast a lot of speakers put out tighter sharpened sound that's exciting and clear but not sleep inducing). - The clock is amazingly non-disturbing. I didn't think anyone could make an led clock that didn't keep me awake when next to my bed, but this one does the trick. And I didn't even turn the contrast down. - Sticky rubber keeps it from sliding around. - It looks fine. Philips has a new model that...uh, it doesn't look good. This one looks fine next to the bed. What's Bad: - Controls are just awful, like other reviewers said. The buttons are located around the edges and it's difficult to find the one you're looking for. It took me a while to just figure out how to turn the alarm off. This is despite that it comes with a touch screen and menu. Everything is work to figure out how to do it, you really need the instructions that come with it. Despite this I'm not sending it back - you can figure out the controls - but as someone who does tech work all day it still took me 30 minutes to figure out how to do stuff on this. - The sound part of the alarm turns itself off after 60 seconds. Wth. - It's easy to hit the alarm control by accident which disables the alarm until you turn it on again. - No line in or sd card slot for your own music. - No automatic day/weekend switch, as the device doesn't even know the date. - You can really really dim the clock but cannot turn it off completely. Not a problem for me, but I can see why it could be for other people. - An electrical outage won't lose your alarms or settings, they're saved. And if the power comes back on it will resume the alarm still waking you up at the correct time. And the clock stays accurate through a power outage as well. However, if the power is out when your alarm it will skip it. Seems odd for such an expensive device. My advice to Phillips is to stay with the physical design, but move all the physical controls to the menu/touchscreen. And fix the other annoyances I mentioned. I'm so relieved to find a decent light that I'm keeping this and not returning it, but because of the horrid physical controls I cannot recommend it to other people. If it had good controls I would have bought it as a christmas present for other family members who also suffer from sleep issues, but I just can't see myself giving out something with such horrid controls.