

The WakeMate: A Review after Three Months - icey
http://blog.nuclearsandwich.com/the-wakemate-a-review-after-three-months

======
ydant
Last night was my second night using my WakeMate (with Android) and I woke up
around two hours earlier than I planned (not WakeMate's fault) and did
/something/ on my phone and went back to sleep. When I woke up a second time
to my backup alarm I found out that all of my sleep Dara for last night is
apparently lost. As near as I can tell, I is stored on the wristband, but I
can't get it.

It's a frustrating experience and makes me wonder if it will do this a lot.
I'll give it another week or so of trial - I want it to work well, as I have
found that phone based motion sensor alarms seem to help somewhat, but are
unreliable at accurately detecting my movement depending on how far I move
away from them. I like the idea of the WakeMate sensor, but it has to be
reliable.

~~~
nuclearsandwich
In earlier days, it was really easy to kill the Wakemate app by opening a
bunch of other apps and then Android would kindly unload it from memory. The
dev (There's only one between Android and BlackBerry) has fixed this in recent
betas and, I believe, the current market version.

I do find early AM fat finger syndrome to be the more frequent cause of data
loss compared to Wakemate bugs, but they do crop up.

~~~
ydant
Do you find the beta to be worth requesting access to?

I feel for the dev - I'm in similar shoes (although I do have a Blackberry co-
developer, switching between those two environments is not fun). Sometimes it
seems like the only similarity between Java on the two devices is the name.

Hopefully they get the client where it aggressively saves regardless. That's
all I ask - I hate losing data more than I hate missing the wake up time.
Android very often kindly unloads things, and a combination of being on the
original Droid and having some fairly memory intensive apps constantly
resident isn't helping my situation, but I don't think I switched off of the
app, I just checked the time, so Android shouldn't have killed it.

There's definitely some fat-finger protection the Android client could add.
And moving / copying the four options on the main screen (account, ringtone,
etc) to the menu would have helped solve a lot of my initial installation
frustration - I had to search for how to change the ringtone.

I'm still optimistic about the product. It woke me up perfectly yesterday
(although I don't know how much of that was due to anticipation).

~~~
nuclearsandwich
I find the beta group to be really good for WakeMate. There is always the risk
of new bugs as well as new features. If you're super super fussed about your
data, I'd say stay away but it's rare to see a regression. Big issue for me
was it wouldn't store my login so I had to re-authenticate every time I opened
the app to go to bed, which at 5AM when you're getting up in 90 minutes is no
fun at all. I think that went away in a recent nightly.

------
mrchess
I stopped using my wakemate after maybe 3 weeks mostly out of frustration. I
was never able to score higher than 65 despite sleeping for long hours, short
hours, etc. (is my sleeping really that bad every day?). The other thing that
frustrated me is all the data is useless unless you tag it and create your own
trends to follow, i.e. I sleep better when I [exercise]. I sleep worse when I
[ate before bed].

The thing that really got me though is that every time you have to type in the
same tags over again, you can't pick from previous tags, which got old fast.

Oh, they also never sent me back a charger after they told us to throw it out
(first batches of Wakemates had faulty chargers) :(

~~~
nuclearsandwich
I experienced all those same issues. I don't really care about my sleep score
as I'm just in it to abuse my body into giving me more coding hours.
Autosuggesting tags is but a feature request and some developer attention
away. As far as tagging data, I thought the whole point was so that you
_could_ keep your own metrics not that you had to. The only thing they can
monitor is how well you slept. It's up to the users to correlate that with
pre- and post- sleep variables. They have general comments about how to
improve sleep scores, but it'd be nice if they offered suggestions based on
apparent symptoms in your data.

The charger thing is super annoying, especially that they offered no avenue to
recycle them instead of just chucking them in the garbage.

~~~
mrchess
Yeah I should have been more clear.

I did like tracking my own data, but I got annoyed that every day I would have
to type the same tags again in order to do it:

M: [exercise][ate late][shower] Tu: [exericise][tv before bed] Wed: [tv before
bed][shower] Th.. etc

It's maintainable after a few days but after a week or so you just get sick of
typing it over and over.

------
invisible
I will buy a WakeMate if they can resolve the two issues brought up in this
review (not losing data and a nap feature).

The only problem now is that these were the issues that they were having 3
months ago when it was released.

~~~
gnemeth
We are working on a nap feature and the data loss issue is fixed!

~~~
evangineer
I'm getting closer to pulling the trigger and buying WakeMate. I'm finding HN
a great source of info about WakeMate & it's how I found out about it in the
first place!

