Wake Up Android!

Great, I woke up at 1 pm today. I was supposed to wake up at 10 am, but my phone had decided that the snooze time is 3 minutes instead of the 15 minutes I had set it to, so I shut it off...and slept 3 hours more.

The Android clock application apparently forgets the snooze settings every time the phone is shut off and restarted...for some settings. So, it's a bug. It's a built-in app and I haven't updated my phone's OS, so it probably won't be fixed without an OS upgrade. Well, I probably should do one.

Not to say, the built-in alarm clock application is otherwise just great. It can have multiple different alarm profiles that repeat on particular weekdays. For each alarm, it lets you set the time, snooze interval, number of repeats, and also a "smart alarm" that first plays peaceful music, and only after a number of minutes it turns into a annoying buzzer that really forces you to wake up...or press the snooze button.

But when I snooze, I want to snooze longer than the default 3 minutes or otherwise I'll just hate the alarm or shut it down. But it keeps reverting to the default after a restart, so when it annoys me, I turn it off because I'm totally certain that I've properly woken up and it's OK, and in a couple of seconds fall back to sleep.

Yeah, my brain does not work quite rationally when it's just waking up. And I know it all too well.

The Annoying Calendar

Then, the calendar events. I am totally lost if there's no one or no thing that reminds me of them. That's why my Nokia E90 was totally indispensable for me. Its calendar application too had a proper noisy alarm and a snooze function. Unfortunately, the Android calendar hasn't.

I don't know why, but the default Android calendar app, nor any other calendar app for Android, does not have a proper alarm in their calendar. "*BLEEP* *BLEEP*", that's all it says, once. If I've left it in my room or if there's even a bit noise around, I won't hear it. There's a collection of maybe fifteen different sounds, but they all last just couple of seconds and there's no repeat or snooze function, like in the alarm clock.

Apparently it's not just Android, I've been told all iPhone calendars have the same behavior as well.

I've tried several other calendar apps, many rated with 5 stars, and none of them offer any better alarm function.

My software mind starts guessing at this point that the problem is with Google Calendar, as all the apps use that. It probably allows just one alarm at a preset time before the event, and doesn't allow any other settings, such as the snooze settings.

This is not a small problem to me.

I really need a technical solution that actually works. Now. No, make that 10 years ago.