@AmazonAppStore FREE app of the day – Gentle Alarm

Tired of waking up in a fog? Gentle Alarm is a full-featured alarm clock app that works with your sleep cycle to help you wake up feeling renewed and energized. With a full slate of audio and visual customization options and clever tricks for getting heavy sleepers out of bed, Gentle Alarm has something for everyone.

Wake up on the right side of the bed

Waking up during the right part of your sleep cycle is the key to starting off your morning feeling refreshed. As you reach the last few hours of sleeping, you will typically alternate between light and deep sleep in 30 minute intervals. If your alarm starts blasting when you are in a deep sleep interval, you will wake up feeling groggy and tired, even if you had a full night of sleep. If, however, you wake up during light (stage one, or REM phase) sleep, you will feel alert, rested and ready to go.

Two-stage alarm

Gentle Alarm takes a novel approach to ensuring you wake up during a light sleep phase: a two-stage alarm. This simple but ingenious feature allows you to set a pre-alarm that goes off at a low volume 30 minutes before your regular alarm. If you are in a deep sleep phase when the pre-alarm goes off, you will simply sleep through it and wake up 30 minutes later when your regular alarm goes off–no harm done. However, if you are in light sleep, you will hear it and wake up refreshed, even though you woke up 30 minutes earlier than your regular alarm was set for.

Gentle Alarm gives you numerous ways to set up your alarms by creating profiles. Create as many profiles as you like: weekday, weekend, naps, etc. Choose standard or two-phase alarms and set fade-in times, snooze intervals, alarm duration, and more. You can also set up a “safe alarm” if you are worried about sleeping through your alarm; this adds a secondary, full volume ringtone after your regular alarm has finished.

Create your morning soundtrack

Branch out from the standard alarm ringtone by choosing tracks from your music library as alarm sounds. You can also wake up to a playlist, have alarms chosen at randomly from a playlist, or set a vibration-only alarm. Specify volume levels for audible alarms, and intensity for vibrate-only alarms.

Gentle Alarm offers a clever puzzle system to help make sure you are fully awake before you can turn your alarm off. With this feature enabled, a basic memory puzzle appears when your alarm sounds and you tap the ‘off’ button . A sequence of dots is displayed and you will have to repeat the sequence before the alarm will turn off. You can vary the complexity and speed requirements of the sequence, and have the option of reducing alarm volume while you are completing the puzzle.

Night vision

Gentle alarm gives you a number of ways to customize the look of your alarm clock – day or night. You can set fonts, screen backgrounds, and colors. Snooze and alarm dismiss buttons can be one of two sizes, and the status bar can be turned off for a darker screen. Create different sets of visuals, for a bright daytime screen and a dim night display. You can also have your phone switch to flight mode while you sleep, reducing electromagnetic exposure and saving your battery power.