Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Positives: * Wake up to a CD. (There aren't many units that provide this functionality) * Has battery backup (a necessity). * Large numerals for the time. * Can take input from a smart phone, etc. (3.5mm plug). * Having two alarm times is helpful. * The price is reasonable (more or less). * You can go both up and down in setting numbers such as time and alarm time. (I really hate clocks that force you to go through 23 hours or 59 minutes if you miss by one.) Don't like: * If you do have to go forward by 59 minutes, there's no way to speed it up. * You can't adjust the brightness of the front screen. (Not a big problem for me, but it might be for others). * The user interface is confusing and nonintuitive. (For example, the way you turn off the alarm is by pressing the power button far back on the left-hand side. Who would've guessed that?) * The instructions are confusing and poorly written. If you work at it long enough, you can figure it out, but who wants to spend that kind of time? (I'm an ex-technical writer. This is really bad). * A typical instruction: "If you select Wake to music, please set the volume level of music/radio with the power ON before putting the unit into Standby mode." This raises the questions: What is standby mode? How do you get into and out of it? Will the alarm still work if you're not in standby mode? (etc.) (In the design arena, it's widely believed that anything that has "modes" is a bad user design). * Because there are a lot of buttons and the instructions are confusing, setting it makes me nervous. What if I pushed the button wrong and the alarm doesn't work? * The only way to verify the alarm time (important to do, don't you agree?) is to go through the same procedure that you would use to set the time in the first place. This is cumbersome. * I'm guessing that most people would buy this for using the alarm to wake up to a CD. (If you're going to wake up to a radio or cell phone, there are cheaper and better units.) But to wake up to a CD, you can only play track one from the beginning every time. This can get a little boring. * If you use the "wake to music" (not alarm) function, you automatically get the same source that you last used (CD, FM radio, AM radio, etc.). But what if you want to wake to CD but listen to the radio during the day? Now you have to fiddle with the machine before you go to sleep. * The sound (from tiny speakers) is okay to use to wake you up, but nowhere as good as a typical boombox. Thus effectively the unit has only one real, full quality function: as an alarm clock. * The print on the buttons is pretty small. With older eyes I need glasses and good light to see it. * To tune AM or FM, you press the >>| or |<< and wait until the radio finds the next strong station. In practice, this means that if you commonly listen to two stations that are far apart on the dial, you have to laboriously go through all the in between stations. Generally, you'll decide it isn't worth it. However, there are presets. * There are 10 presets for each AM and FM. When you figure them out, they work fairly well. The only problem is this. Say you are on FM. You have to press the memory button up to 10 times if you are past the station you want. You have to go through all 10 positions even if you only have two stations set. Whoever designed this should be ashamed of themselves. * The way you distinguish between AM and FM is that there is a decimal point in the FM number. The way you know you've selected CD is that the screen says "__." (I.e., track zero). You can get used to all of this, but it's not a great user interface. * To my knowledge, there's no way to know whether the backup batteries are bad. (In better machines, there is a light to show that the backup batteries are active). This means that the first time you'll find out that your backup batteries are bad is after the unit fails. I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to keep it. It's a real tossup.