Alarm Annoyance on Windows Mobile
Posted on 28 March 2007, at 3:26 pm, by Mitchell Oke
This morning I almost missed my train because my alarm didn’t wake me up. But why? I had the alarm set, and I didn’t have my Treo on silent, so why did I wake up just in time to throw on clothes and run out the door? For some reason Windows Mobile relates the alarm volume to the overall system volume.
Honestly, I think it is absurd!! Surely it can be assumed that if the person doesn’t have their phone on silent they want to HEAR their alarms. If they must have a volume control on it, PLEASE make it separate. I normally check to make sure the volume is at max, will have to watch that in future…
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8 Comments For This Post
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March 28th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Hey, at least your alarms are going off – even if you can’t hear them! It took a hard reset to get my Treo’s alarms to come back.
March 28th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Don’t worry I understand your pain. I went through a hard reset for that too
March 28th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Great point, Mitch; but unfortunately, your premise isn’t exactly correct…
If alarms went off at full volume regardless of system volume, then you may have problems with alarms sounding at in appropriate times; or louder than you want given the situation that you’re in. For example, you set an alarm to remind you to leave work early; but get pulled into an ad-hoc meeting before its time to go. The subject is serious and you forget to silence your phone. All of a sudden… BING-BONG! Not good.
MS doesn’t give us an option for controlling a third volume level (System, vs. Phone vs. Alarm). You only get the first two. The thought behind this is that your system volume level is sufficient for your alarms. I know you almost missed your train. The only thing I can say is that you need to make certain you turn your volume up before you go to bed.
March 28th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Yeah I normally do. I was playing an MP3 for someone during the day, so I’d say I changed the volume and forgot. Whoops!!
I think I am going to go buy a cheap bedside clock as a backup
March 29th, 2007 at 6:37 am
HA! Dude, you’re awesome! I hear you though. I’m inches away from hard resetting my 750 again so that I can get things to run a little better… I wish the OS were a little more optimized. Sometimes it just doesn’t feel as clean as it should, even when factory fresh… That’s where I think a lot of these problems are stemming from – memory leaks and less than optimal code.
March 29th, 2007 at 7:24 am
Yeah I am at my wits end with my 750. The battery is dying after 5hrs (with maybe 1.5hrs total use). And thats AFTER a hard reset with nothing installed…
March 29th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
I’ve been searching for months for a decent solution to WM5 alarms. I really didn’t think my requirements were that tough but it seems that none of the apps out there can meet them.
What I’m looking for:
* Vibration support
* Single screen showing status of (aprox) 10 different alarms with functionality to be able to quickly disable and enable the alarms
* Simple UI to set new alarms
* Volume settings separate from the system volume:
– I want to be able to set a “vibrate only alarm” that
really won’t make a single sound even if my system
volume is at maximum.
– I want to be able to set a “Sound” alarm that will
make a noise regardless of the system volume.
There are so many WM5 alarm / clock applications out there and believe me I’ve been playing with all of them. They all seem to be able to support one or two of the above needs but never all of them. Here’s what I’ve found:
Spb Time
– No vibration support.
Rivia Gentimer
– Loads slowly.
– Doesn’t support vibrations.
– Awful UI.
– Ridiculous procedure to set the days to sound an alarm – you have to create a named schedule profile (!). How redundant is a named recurrence for days of the week? Nothing beats the conciseness of reusing “SMTWTFS” and simply inserting ‘-’ where appropriate.
Chronos
– Quite fast.
– Supports vibrations very well – lots of customizations.
– For some reason won’t allow me to set the vibrations to continue for very long so after a few seconds the notification is on screen but the vibes have stopped. If I’m still asleep that’s a major problem.
Delmar Alarm Clock
– No vibration support.
Is it really that tough? Why do all the coders creating clock applications think that the most important thing to all PPC users is “support for MP3 files”?
March 29th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Mitch,
I ran into the same problem with mine the other day as well. Came close to turning off the phone so I knew it would have power during the train ride home. I got lucky, and made it to the car (after a full day and nearly a 1 hr train ride to the station) with about 12% left.
This is a 3G/Edge conflict issue. No doubt in my mind… as soon as the WM6 upgrade is released for the Cingular 750, I’m all over it… I may also look to buy an extended battery.