The WakeMate: A Review after Three Months | Hacker News Reader

The WakeMate: A Review after Three Months

blog.nuclearsandwich.com

37 pointsicey12 comments

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.

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.

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).

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.

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) :(

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.

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.

Now that we've got the monitoring down we're working on ways to help people improve their sleep. This blog post talks a bit about one of the features we're testing: http://blog.wakemate.com/2011/04/05/743/.

"It also isn't the best at preserving your data on Android, there have been a number of nights where I lost data due to bluetooth bugs, application crashes, accidentally running the device battery out, and so on."

Likewise, I gave up after a couple of weeks for the reasons mentioned in the article, especially re: saving my data on my Android/EVO. Perhaps some of the software updates have improved this, but mentally I'd already given up. It's an awesome idea. But once hardware is involved, the typical startup challenges seem to rise exponentially and WakeMate got more than their fair share.

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.

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

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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com