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Comment by nroach | Hacker News Reader

If the product doesn't work and perform its intended task, then what's the point of reviewing the feature bullets?

I know that personally there's nothing as disappointing as reading glowing reviews of a product's potential, only to find that I a paid good money for what should have been a pre-release product. Sure, as a developer there's always a push to just ship it and get some "traction" but the flip side of that is that doing so risks alienating customers (and reviewers).

If I'm a customer looking to make a purchase, what you're implying is that "in a couple of weeks/months when those specific bugs are sorted out this [product] will [no longer] be absolutely worthless." Is that really the standard customers should expect?

It's nice to see a reviewer as a customer advocate occasionally rather than just recite the bullet points of a press release.

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I agree that Wakemate shouldn't have given them a beta unit and should have made sure things were up and running well before getting them to review it. In fact, given that there is a ton of pre-orders lined up, why even bother getting them to review it yet? You've had people waiting for a year to buy it, surely that will keep you busy for the first few weeks? Then you can drum up some more coverage.

My dissapointment mainly is that I want to know if the whole concept actually worked, did he wake up feeling refreshed? All they seemed to do was harp on about the battery life. The only health comment was the snide remark about high blood pressure, which raised alarm bells until I realized it was a joke. They could have charged it just before bed and given us a review of its main functionality and then said don't buy it at the moment as its full of bugs, but the concept works. In the comments he said he usually got 2/3 days battery life out of it.

And this is just stupid: "The other big problem? Sometimes it's nice to wake up early and just lie all cozy in bed, dozing lightly and knowing there's a big world out there full of cold air, comforted by having 14 whole minutes left before your stupid alarm goes off and you have to put warm feet to frigid floor. " A big problem with the device is that you want to snuggle up and feel good about not having to get out of bed soon?

The theory is pretty sound imo:

REM atonia, a state in which the motor neurons are not stimulated and thus the body's muscles do not move. [From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REM_atonia#Physiology]

I would totally disagree that the theory is sound. The fact wrist-based actigraphy correlates at all with REM phases is not scientifically validated in any robust way.

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