Timex Dual Alarm Clock Radio for Mp3 Songs (Black)
by Timex
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List Price: Category: Network Media Player See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Timex Dual Alarm Clock Radio for Mp3 Songs (Black)
Customer Review: Exactly what I wanted, but with just two silly flaws
Summary: 4 Stars
If you're like me, you Googled "mp3 alarm clock" and you got 1000 hits that play cd's you make yourself. Who cares about that? Then you typed in "flash drive alarm clock" and you got this one.
If that is the case, this IS exactly what you are looking for. I am extremely impressed with the feature set of this clock being exactly what they should be.
The flash drive portion works perfectly. Stick a flash drive in it, and it plays the music. Easy as pie.
I did have to look a few things up in the manual to figure them out, but the manual is very good and did answer all my questions. The reason for needing guidance on a few things is Timex got allot of features into the clock while using a very clean interface, so many of the buttons do more than one thing, or require more than one push in order to activate the feature you wanted. But once you know what they are, they make sense and are easy to use and remember.
The two silly flaws are these:
1. There is a compartment in the top of the clock to hide the USB flash drive and keep the look of the clock nice and clean. That's great, but it is exactly too small to store the remote in. We are talking millimeters here. If you are going to use an SD card for your music then this compartment would be empty and if you wanted to store the remote in this compartment, you can't. Not really important, but kinda silly.
2. Much more significant is this: the buttons on the front of the clock beep when you push them. These are the buttons which control the alarm. The beep, is a serious, shrill, loud beep. Think "smoke detector". So it is 4 in the morning, the whole house is asleep, wife is asleep next to me, baby asleep (between us of course), son asleep in the next room. Alarm goes off with nice quiet gentle music no one but me can hear. I can hit the power button and that shuts the music off silently. But the alarm is automatically reset to go off at the same time tomorrow which is a cool feature. However I'm getting up at this rediculous hour because I'm catching a plane and won't be here tomorrow, so I want to turn the alarm off. To do this (in the dark) I need to push the alarm button "BEEEEEEP!!!!!" (Wife jumps and gasps) and you have to push it twice "BEEEEEEP!!!!!" (Baby stirs and starts to whine). Heaven help you if you pushed the wrong button because if you need to keep pushing the family will start to evacuate the house. An absolutely REDICULOUS flaw for an appliance that is very likely to be the only one used in a house where all but one person is supposed to be ASLEEP. And it is this one thing which keeps me from giving the product five stars.
I have actually found it is better to just leave the alarm on in these cases and let wifey deal with it when I'm gone. Because we use the music of our choice it is gentle and quiet and she just shuts it off every morning and goes back to sleep, unlike the BEEEEEEP which gets your heart racing and adreniline flowing and you are never going to get back to sleep for fear of your life.
So anyway, there you go. Really like it, thinking of getting another, and would totally reccomend it to others, but if you have a family, be prepared to work around the outrageous beep of the alarm buttons. Otherwise, it's great.
Customer Review: Not perfect, but I love it.
Summary: 4 Stars
I got my Timex TM80 to help with my insomnia. I needed a clock radio that would play the music or sounds that I downloaded and hopefully lull me to sleep. I'd tried my MP3 player, but who wants to fall asleep with earbuds? The radio has great sound. It's got a great speaker and lots of volume. The volume knob is digital, and doesn't turn a volume 'pot' like most do, so it feels 'different'. It is not a cheap knob, like some state, but just feels that way.
You should know that if you have an SD card and USB stick in, the SD card will play, ignoring the USB. It may be that the SD would play and then switch to USB, but I've got a lot of songs on my SD card, so it would be a long time before it hit the USB.
I download a couple of songs to the USB and use it for my 'fall asleep' music. I like that I can change it every night, as I've not yet found the sleep sounds I'm looking for. I usually have about 30 minutes of music, and set the TM80 at "Sleep 120" with repeat, so it will repeat the 30 minutes of songs over the two hour period. I usually awake to buzzer, and have had no problems with it. The buzzer is more of a chirp, and less irritating than a lot of alarms I've heard. It works well, as the volume increases at each chirp, so within a few chirps, it will finally hit a volume that penetrates the fog.
I was surprised that when playing from an SD card with folders, the TM80 will traverse the folders automatically when playing. That is, if you had 2 songs in the 'root' of the card, then a folder underneath with more songs, it will play the first 2 songs, then go into the sub folder and start playing those. I found this out when I put to 'sleepy' songs on the SD card, with my 'rock' stuff in sub folders. After about 15 minutes of tranquility, while using the 'Sleep' mode, I suddenly got startled by my Rock songs playing from the sub folder. I had assumed (I don't know why) that the radio would not traverse folders unless led there manually via the 'Folders' button. FYI.
The AM radio will pick up HORRIBLE noise from the USB stick ( and probably the SD card too, not sure) when it is installed in the USB port. I had to remove my USB stick in order to listen to AM stations. I didn't try it with FM, but will assume it's the same. It appears the radio picks up the 'computer' noise which is the communication with the USB stick, even if it is not being played. Somewhat of a bad design, but I can live with it.
This radio is not perfect, but I still like it. Yes, the LED light in the 'on/off' button is too bright, even with the LCD display off, but I'll probably put a small piece of semi-opaque tape on it to cut down the brightness. The buttons are smooth and flush with the surface ( sleep/alarm1/alarm2/wake to/ on/off) but as another reviewer did, I'll probably put a drop of glue a couple to make them easier to discern.
I like that the snooze button is well placed, and also controls the LCD, turning it totally off if desired.
I like the systems tone and volume, and appearance. It's a bit quirky, but pretty well does the job for me.
Customer Review: Great as an alarm, marginal as a mp3 player.
Summary: 4 Stars
1st thing's first... The device has 2 alarms that simply work. That's nice for a change. The last few combo alarm-clock / media player devices I've purchased (*cough* especially Homedics) had major flaws when it came to the alarm & snooze functions actually working reliably. The alarm is also nice because the beeper fades in over about 5-10 seconds. The manual seems to say that the alarm will shut off after an hour of snoozing, but I have yet to run into that situation. It seems to just work.
The screen is a backlit lcd type deal with 3 levels of light and a backlight off feature. You cycle through them by hitting snooze.
The mp3 player has several nagging flaws.
It often chokes on files encoded at very high bitrates or encoded by crappy encoders. If you encode everything at 192cbr using Lame or Frauhauffer, you're good. Try a 320 xing encoded mp3 & the device is likely to quit on you. So... if you encode all of your own mp3s at modest bitrates, you're good to go, but if you download anything off of the internet, you're likely to find a file that winamp / windows media player will play, but will cause the mp3 player on the alarm clock to shut off.
The repeat button doesn't make any sense to me. It's been a month & I still haven't figured out what it repeats. Playing the last file on the usb stick seems to shut the device off & playing the last song in a folder seems to make it advance to the next folder. I'm not seeing any difference between the repeat button's on & off state.
The clock has 1 nagging flaw... You can't view it from below. The screen is only viewable from above or parallel with the device. My nightstand is 2 feet higher than the bed, so i can't see my clock unless I tip it down or raise my torso up.
The speaker isn't very good. It's not the worst speaker, but I expected just slightly better. Playing nature cds of rainstorms produces a highly colored sound where the rain is barely audible & the thunder is really loud. I would pay the extra $15 to get a good speaker guys... The sound quality is slightly below that of a standard iHome (also produced by the same company).
I can't complain too much... this is my 3rd device in the category & so far it's the most reliable as an alarm clock. A firmware update would be nice though...
Customer Review: Many things to like but also many flaws and build quality issues.
Summary: 3 Stars
Well, soon after I got one, I thought it was a great deal for the price and got a couple more for the kids and a spare. Now, after a while, the warts have emerged...
Pros:
- Great features for the price.
- Stick a USB thumb drive in it and wake up to anything you want.
- Remote control works for (too) easy snoozing.
- Really the sound quality is not too bad.
- Adjustable levels on the brightness.
Cons:
1) Build quality & bugs. (Out of four of them) one didn't work and I had to exchange it. One had a wiring issue maybe on the speaker wire and I have to smack it to get it to make sound. Sometimes (every couple months) one will lock up and need to be rebooted by removing the batteries and un-plugging.
2) Interface design problem that the snooze button also is the brightness control. Scenario: The brightness is off. The alarm goes off. Now, you can't adjust the brightness without snoozing it.
3) Interface design badness in general. There is exactly 1 reasonable control: the volume. To set the alarm, to play the music, to tune it, to set the time _anything_ other than changing the volume requires messing with tiny buttons on the top or flat buttons on the front or eensy buttons on the back, _none_ of which are well designed. The top buttons (TEN of them) basically merge into one long row without any tactile differentiation, and tiny labels, blending into one another. The front buttons, (SIX of them), are flat and again without any tactile differentiation. In the back is DST, zone, and setting mode. The remote control it fine, but the TWENTY buttons, switches, and dials on the clock itself will not be appreciated by most users. My wife hates this part.
Summary:
Still the best thing for the price if you want a non ipod-dock based MP3 alarm clock. Just be prepared that the interface on the clock itself is (very) poor (though the remote is OK) and that the build quality is a crapshoot. Most MP3 alarm clocks require a real iPod, then there are the pricier ones with Wifi radio - this product is basically alone it the niche.
Customer Review: Timex does it almost perfectly
Summary: 4 Stars
Update: June 22, 2009
I figured out why the mp3 player can lock up. If you do NOT use the "daylight savings time" switch, and change the times manually, it does not lock up. Period. Obviously a software glitch. I've gone back to using this as a player AND alarm clock.
Update: February 6 2008
I'm dropping this thing to two stars (even though Amazon won't let me change the display) because of something that turned up with it: the mp3 player can "lock up" the unit so that neither the clock nor the alarm work. Give Timex credit, they DID mention this can happen in the user's manual, but it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that an unreliable alarm clock is WORSE than useless. If I had known about this before purchase, I'd never have bought the thing. As it is, I'll still use it as a player, but never as an alarm clock.
They get the "almost" and only four stars on two grounds:
1. The button labels are too small for over-50 eyes, and hard to read, even the ones on the front. I would suggest luminescent labels in at least 14point font.
2. Can't change the "snooze" time from a fixed 9 minutes.
Other than those, this unit is an absolute godsend for me and my wife. Dual alarms, programmable "sleep" time in 30-minute increments. I've got to shout this: IT PLAYS MP3 FILES FROM A THUMB DRIVE!!!!!
That's the very feature I bought this thing for. My wife and I like to listen to New Age Ambient music while we drift off to sleep, and it was simple to build mp3s from our purchased CDs, load them into a 2Gig thumb drive and play them with the "sleep" on. We don't have to fumble around changing CDs, the footprint on the headboard is MUCH smaller than a CD player which seems to break down and need replacement once a year.
Sound quality is superb, and it's easy to choose which "subfolder" on the drive you want to start with.
This unit was worth every penny I paid for it.