Awaken review – clock app

A number of commentators noted the absence of a clock app for the iPad even before it was launched, and many people miss it. Naturally, app writers have leapt into the fray to fill the gap. I’ve been testing several Clock replacements, so let’s start with one of the newest contenders, Awaken from EmbraceWare.

Price: $1.99 in the US App Store
Size: 9 MB
Format: Universal iPad & iPhone app

What It Has

Awaken has a number of different clock functions: a full-screen digital clock, an alarm function, and a sleep timer. And, somewhat incongruously, it has a full-screen flashlight with a number of colour choices.

The clock itself has a number of styles, including a clock overlaid over a digital photo frame feature, and I find that the clock part of this style is a little hard to read, as it’s offset against an overlay that’s a bit too transparent. The other clock styles are eminently readable, however, and all take advantage of the iPad’s rotatability.

The alarm feature lets you save a number of alarms – I’m not sure if there’s a limit on the number; I’ve never reached it if there is. Alarms can be a once-off or recurring, with music or a buzzer with a number of alarm tones (including some suitably jarring ones). There are some usability niggles in this section – for instance, new alarms always default to music rather than an alarm sound, and once an alarm has passed you have to manually delete it from the list. Aside from these glitches the alarm’s very functional, however.

The sleep timer allows you to leave the iPad playing music and it will turn off or fade out the sound and screen brightness after a preset time (up to 24 hours). It allows you to select music by artist, song, album or playlist (based on your iPod playlists) and provides music shuffle, too, although it lacks the other options of a full-featured music player.

What It Doesn’t Have

There are two features of the iPhone/iPod Clock that Awaken lacks, however: it doesn’t have a stopwatch, and it doesn’t have a timer. You can always use the Alarms setting to get around this latter lack, but that’s not as fast or convenient as a proper timer would be, and I hope to see this appear in future versions.

In addition, Awaken doesn’t offer any analogue clock options, which doesn’t bother me, but some users may prefer a different style.

And, finally, although there’s a desktop version of Awaken and this app also works on the iPhone/iPod Touch, there’s no way to sync alarms between different versions of the app – this probably won’t bother most users, but power users with lots of preset recurring alarms might find that disappointing.

(It is also worth noting that some users report that the alarm doesn’t always go off, especially after receiving text messages, alerts from other apps, and so on; this has been reported with other alarm apps too, including the iPhone OS built-in clock, so it may be a problem with the platform rather than the app.)

The Bottom Line

Overall, Awaken has an appealing price tag. It provides a useful and attractive clock, and a feature-rich alarm, and we recommend it for typical users. Those who rely on timer/stopwatch features may find it less useful.