WakeMate to begin shipping in march

[paul9290]

I recently bought the sleep cycle alarm app for my iPhone for $2 bucks. Works like a charm for what it advertises.

THus I wonder what differentiates WakeMate from Sleep Cycle?

[drewcrawford]

I've also been using Sleep Cycle since the first WakeMate delay and I've been thinking about this in some detail. Here are the conclusions I've come to:

* WakeMate seems to be primarily competing on price (!) against FitBit and Zeo. The problem is, Sleep Cycle way undercuts them.

* I would be willing to pay for dedicated hardware that would free up my iPhone for music listening before bed(like Zeo or FitBit). Unfortunately, WakeMate doesn't help in this regard.

* There are times that I think Sleep Cycle is inaccurate, but I think it's "good enough" in a lot of sleep circumstances. Dedicated hardware should improve over a bed accelerometer a bit, but I don't think the additional accuracy alone is worth $48

* I'm hoping WakeMate's statistics and analysis meet or exceed the Zeo, but to be honest Sleep Cycle's stats are "good enough" for a variety of circumstances.

I really do think they're in trouble, quite independent of the shipping delays. Unless they can come up with some novel feature that nobody else can emulate, I can't really see how they can improve enough on Sleep Cycle to capture enough of the market. I think their best bet is almost to avoid the iPhone now.

[derwiki]

I wouldn't have thought to look for something like this! I found out there's an Android app that tries to do the same thing called 'Gentle Alarm'.

[prodigal_erik]

I'm disappointed they haven't corrected "works on all phones" on the front page. Still not true.

[roel_v]

Maybe off topic, but I just did the pre-order and Google Checkout is one of the worst checkout experiences I had in the last few years. The translations look like they came from babelfish, no integration with WakeMate itself, ugly - you would think that a company with as many smart people as Google would figure out that this is not a good way to end your sales funnel.

[zoomzoom83]

Damn. I literally had an idea to build such a device last night, looks like somebody beat me to the punch :p

[natrius]

Multiple people.

http://www.fitbit.com/