Here’s a little something new. An alarm clock by Ipeak that wakes you up with artificial sunlight, for that relaxing natural start to the day. It’s quite simple really as it’s just an alarm clock surrounded by a round LED ring that glows at multiple modes of brightness to simulate light growing in your room until it’s at max brightness.
It starts off around a half early before your alarm is supposed to sound and begins to raise its brightness from there. If that doesn’t wake you up, then around 10 minutes before the time of the alarm, it begins to sound off (either a tune from the selection of nature-themed sound effects or FM radio) at 50% of your set volume and lasts for about a minute. Then at alarm time, it will sound off at 100% of the volume you set for it.
It tells the time, it wakes you up, it get’s in FM radio plus some natural sound effects and lights up to wake you up or manually to add a little light to the room. See? Simple.
The design of the alarm clock is all plastic and very light weight. Kind of reminds you of one of those cheap items you’d pick up from Walgreens or Big Lots as you’re shopping around. An impulse buy really. It comes with a microUSB to USB cable and a wall adapter to keep it powered with. The antenna for FM radio is a built-in tail that runs out of the back that you’d simply let run down the back of your nightstand or something, out of sight.
It can also be powered by 2 AAA batteries, however you only get time and audible alarm function when so. The time also vanishes after about 5 seconds and you have to hit one of the buttons on the back to bring it back on for another 5 seconds. This is to preserve battery life. The alarm function would limit itself to just alarm time and go off at 100% for 3 minutes and then shut off.
All alarms can be ended by pressing any of the buttons on the back side of the clock.
There are a selection of buttons across the front that are touch-sensitive. The first one sets the mode of the light to natural, color or back off again. When natural light is selected, it is a warm off-white at 12% brightness and the additional buttons will increase the brightness (25%, 50%, 75% and 100%). When in color mode, the additional buttons will change the color of the light–you have green, red, blue and pink to choose from.
You have four buttons across the back of the clock. One is to set the time and alarm functions. You have up and down buttons that control the time and functions as well as volume. The fourth button manually turns the radio on and off when you just want to listen.
If you press and hold the radio button down, it will eventually start scanning for stations and creating presets. It does find and provide you with plenty of presets (we got 25, which covered almost every major FM station through the end of the FM range).
The speaker actually isn’t too bad. In our unboxing and introduction video, we mentioned that we didn’t expect much due to its size and build quality. However, it sounded like any normal/basic nightstand alarm clock speaker. Is it worth $35+, probably not. Feels more like a $19.99 or less item from again, Walgreens or Big Lots. The speaker does have a slight presence of bass to it as well which allows for the music listening to be doable, but only for alarm usage.
Sadly, like any other (non-smart/connected) clock from the medieval times, if you unplug it, you have to reset the time when you plug it back in. Thankfully, if you keep AAA batteries in it, you do have a fallback plan as it will continue to work and keep the time. If those batteries die however, you are back to square one. The batteries really should be treated as a backup option in case your power goes out overnight. Not as normal alarm/usage conditions. You should keep the alarm plugged into an outlet or powered USB port at all times for optimal performance.
As mentioned, you have multiple natural-themed sounds to choose from for your alarm as well as FM radio. A total of 7 selectable alarm modes. We found it funny that effect 1 and effect 6 are absolutely the same, so really you only get 5 natural sounds plus radio (a missed mistake during testing/production?). The following audio clip demonstrates the 6 (aka 5) natural sounds you can choose from before you get to 7, which represents FM radio.
Personally, I would choose FM radio because the natural sounds remind me more of the sounds I use on an app of mine to help me sleep, not wake me up. Then again, at the higher volumes you can choose from, I guess it would be annoying enough to give you a little jolt.
We did find that a few of the radio frequencies that it saved to the FM presets weren’t anything but an odd noise that it obviously felt was music. It sounds kind of like an deflating below that is being pinched at the opening to create a whistling sound. You can here it here in this audio clip…
It doesn’t use much power, so you can also use it as a nightlight for children and let it run all night. Thanks to the energy efficiency of LED, you don’t hear “dad’s” yelling around the house about how he has to pay the electric bill and everyone keeps leaving the lights on. We tested the clock out and got the following averages:
- Idle (clock face only): 0.4 watts
- Radio on + clock face: 1.1 watts
- Max light setting + clock face: 3.2 watts
- Max light setting + radio + clock face: 3.8 watts
Our Conclusion
Well, it works. The FM radio functionality works fine and picks up stations pretty good (outside of the few frequencies of noise). The light is pretty bright and if you keep it close enough to your face (ie, nightstand) while your sleeping, it should do it’s job. The natural sounds feel more like something to put you to sleep at a lower volume than to wake you up, so as I mentioned, you’d probably find yourself using radio for this. It’s available on Amazon right now for $34.99, which is a bit high for our tastes. As mentioned, this feels like something you’d find at Walgreens (or similar store) for $19.99. It says the original MSRP price was $79.99, which would have caused a failing score with us if that was what the current price was. The radio works, the light works. However, it’s built using simple materials, mimics the more affordable items on certain shelves and has a few odd flaws–albeit small ones. It’s not perfect, but again, it works.
 | Our Rating | Average Price* $34.99 |
*Average price is based on the time this article was published
Video:
Additional Images:
Are you a manufacturer or distributor that would like us to test something out for review? Contact us and we can let you know where to send the product and we will try it out.
- Final
