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That's one of the things I liked about the Android alarm app that I miss on my iPhone; when you set an alarm and tap "Done", it would say "Alarm set for 9 hours and 22 minutes from now" (or whatever), a quick sanity check to make sure you didn't confuse A.M. and P.M. or accidentally put in the wrong day.

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And a fun fact: it even calculates it correctly across a daylight savings time change. I noticed that when the clocks went back; instead of just subtracting the times, my Android phone accounted for the change and added the hour that I was getting back. Awesome!

I'm sure it's using the UTC time to calculate this. The UTC never goes back.

That's a sarcastic "awesome," right? Because that sounds like a bug. If you need to do something after x hours, this is useful. If you have to do something at a certain clock time, then this could be infuriating.

I'm sorry? He said he wanted to do something at a certain clock time, and the phone correctly told him how many hours away that time was.

Oh! I thought it changed the alarm time. A technically adept friend recently complained about this happening with his Android phone - the 8am alarm went off at 7am - so I had that in mind, though it seems like I was misreading here. Sorry about that.

Haha, if it adjusted the clock time, that would be double or triple bad depending on how it was implemented. The alarm would be wrong unless it were shifted back when the time changed again, thus defeating the point of having altered it in the first place.

This happened to me too; the alarm went off at both 7 am and 8 am instead of just 8.

Yes, I love this little detail. The posted Siri example could use the same thing - since I don't always know the date, it would be nice to see it as a relative time (i.e. Did you mean: 8.5 hours from now, or 1 day 8.5 hours?).

This thing is indeed a lifesaver, not just because of time of day but because alarms could be previously set to only go off on certain days. So when I'm told the alarm won't go off for 80 hours or something, I can correct it immediately.

As a bonus, it gives a good estimate on how much sleep I'm going to get.

In iOS the alarms are sorted chronologically, so if you have more than one alarm set up, it's pretty easy to notice if you accidentally did PM because your alarm ends up at the bottom of the list instead of the top.

Not that I'm saying this is better than what you're describing. I'm just saying this in case any iOS users didn't realize that and it's helpful.

Interesting, I didn't realize that since I only ever have one alarm at a time.

Whilst that is evident if you are aware of that design, it isn't immediately obvious to the average user.

Android also sorts them chronologically, but that alone only helps if you have multiple alarms (and a sufficient number that sorting gives you the needed feedback).

One of the many benefits of using a 24-hour clock (which is the default on the iOS alarm app in my country). Not that I'm disagreeing with you; I think that's a great solution on Android's part.

That only helps with the AM/PM issue, not with the wrong day issue.

Agreed. It's one of the first setting changes I make on new devices; if it's supported: changing the clock to 24 hours

Indeed, just to give some props to Nokia, my (now retired) Nokia N8 running its latest Symbian OS does the same thing for its alarm functionality and tells you the time duration before ringing.

It also displays the time of the next alarm on the lock screen. This is a really nice sanity check: A quick glance at the screen when going to bed ensures that it will wake me up at the right time the next morning.

Heh. My Nokia from '07 does this, too :)

Yes, but the headline "Great Design From Nokia", or even Android, is unlikely to make the HN front page.

And it will even turn itself on to actually wake you up.

That's the only thing I miss from Nokia: alarm goes no matter if the phone is on or not.

I thought the iPhone (and most phones) did that too.

Not like a Nokia device. It will power the phone on from complete off (not sleep or standby) and sound your alarm. Freaked me out when I turned off and boxed up my old N95 and then a week later it turns itself back on and sounds an old alarm I forgot to delete.

This isn't unique to Nokia. All phones I've used will do this. There was one alarm in my HTC Desire that kept going off once a week for a month before I finally realized where the noise was coming from (it was in my closet, so the first few times it happened I thought it was a neighbor's alarm).

One of my favorite features! Before I had an Android phone I can't tell you how many times I bone-headedly picked PM instead of AM. Even with this feature I catch myself getting it backwards sometimes, but I get to correct it right then instead of when it's too late.

This is actually very useful and Symbian (Nokia N73) alarm app also used to do this! Saved me many times from setting wrong alarms. :)

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