WakeMate Shipping Internationally (blog.wakemate.com) |
WakeMate Shipping Internationally (blog.wakemate.com) |
That's an excellent example of trying to help people buy your product.
$25 : join fee.
$15 : monthly fee (cancel immediately).
$50 : shipping fee (assuming its about 500grams or so).
-$25 : credit/discount from wakemate.
= $65* The software (iPhone) was not really very well thought out/polished. I don't want to scroll and select the time to the minute which I'm about to wake up if the wake up interval is 20 minutes.
* Signup for account via app redirects to web page which is not optimized for iPhone browser/smalls screen.
* Battery life is awful - max couple of nights, but its kinda cool, that it charges from the same USB charger than iPhone.
Overall the feeling is that they rushed to complete the software while trying to look cool and colorful, but forgot about the usability or didn't pay enough attention to it.
I have no opinion (yet) about the product concept/usefulness since I have only been using it for couple of days, one of which I wasn't able to get much sleep due to external factors.
Has anyone found more information about how well these work?
I guess for a $49 sleep monitor what do I expect? My sense, having had a taste for what it could do, is that I'd rather pay a bit more if it meant more reliability. It's frustrating when your data collection is thrown off by a lost night, or when the alarm doesn't go off at the right time because it lost its connection.
So it might be difficult to find empirical data on whether it improves your daily energy.
I've had a similar issue with my own product that tracks health data.
Since most of the time I don't really have to get up at a specific time, I usually let myself be woken up by the sunlight, which is the most consistently effective way of waking up refreshed that I've found.
I've been using my wakemate for a few weeks now in a shared bed, but my girlfriend wakes up several hours earlier than me. Since I'm able to ignore her alarm I've never had an issue.
I imagine that since the wakemate wakes up fairly gently (most of the alarm sounds it comes with are pretty calm) and since it tries to wake you up during your lightest sleep, your partner is likely not in their lightest. At worst they could rise to near-awake until you shut off your alarm.
Even if you could have two wakemates syncing together finding a shared near-awake state to wake you both up might be statistically difficult :)
I've noticed that if I'm asleep with my Wakemate running and my girlfriend is working on her laptop in bed or gets up to fix a drink the movement created can show up on the Wakemate and affect my score.
It's ok for couples but definitely the ideal situation is people sleeping on their own, I think.
I think one could use a better reshipping service: if you outsource reshipping anyway (and make your customers sign up for a separate, paid service at that), why not cover all countries as well?
It's not like in sleeping pill commercials where the woman wakes up and gives a happy stretch, instead it's just that your brain is already booted up, there's isn't a wait time for it to start functioning.
If you didn't have enough hours of sleep it won't magically make you fully refreshed. However, we can often survive on less hours of sleep than we think if only we wake up at the right time. And I know that for me if I wake up at the wrong moment it can ruin my day (I remain tired all day even if I've had adequate hours)--this is something WakeMate definitely seems to help with.
Edit: I've found it to be a tad overly tight but I'm a pretty big guy. After a couple of uncomfortable nights I inverted the band which helped a lot and now it's just fine. The device is attached to a pocket on the "inside" of the band, when you invert it the pocket is now on the outside of the band, and the device itself no longer constricts the circumference. It's still just as tightly couples to my arm movements though so I don't believe accuracy has been affected.
WakeMate: its 8 inches by 6 inches by 1 inch WakeMate: and weighs .2 lbs