I recently came over to the dark side, also known to 92.8 million AT&T subscribers as Dropped Call City. Jackie gave me a brief tour on Day 1, noting Zero Coverage Bars in Major Areas to the right and Missed Calls That Don’t Even Ring and Go Straight to VM on the left. So far my favorite spot is One Bar While Standing Next to a Cell Booster…pretty exclusive guest list there.
My surface motivation for the change was to be on a family plan with Brian to save money. My actual motivation was, clearly, to get an iPhone. I’ve been happy with my Droid, but I love Apple so much…and it syncs to my Mac…and 3GS phones are down to $50…and thatfamilyplanorsomething.
Naturally I started getting into the apps first thing. I immediately got Words With Friends, 3 photography apps, a few health-related apps, and…drumroll…Sleep Cycle.
Since I downloaded it last week, I have become a Sleep Cycle ambassador whose singular goal is to track the sleeping cycle of mankind. BECAUSE THIS APP IS AWESOME.
Basically you open the app, set it upside down next to your pillow, and it uses an accelerometer (pretty sure that’s a made-up word) to track your movement throughout the night. I guess it functions under the principle that the less you move, the deeper your sleep is. You give it a 30-minute window for when you need to wake up, and the alarm will go off in the lightest part of your cycle within that window so that you wake up feeling as refreshed as possible. Every morning you wake up to something awesome like this:
True to the graph, I woke up at 1:30 a.m. because the TV was still on.
Why do I love this so much? Let me count the ways:
1. Um, it’s awesome to see your sleep cycle.
2. Sometimes I wonder if I slept well, or if I woke up, or how well I actually slept even if I slept a lot more than normal. Questions: answered.
3. To get it to snooze, all you have to do is pick the phone up and set it back down. No eye-opening necessary.
4. It tracks on average how much sleep you get, which is helping me understand that I really need to go to bed earlier.
5. The alarm-sound options are drastically more pleasant than the iPhone’s basic options. For example, instead of waking up to “DING DONG GET THE F*@& UP!” now it’s more like “Psst. Good morning, beautiful. Your breath does not smell like a dragon fart, in fact, I find it quite attractive. No please don’t get up just yet, I’ll be back in a minute. Kisses.”
I’m really interested to see how well I sleep at night after a big night 'o alcohol. I took a drunk reading this weekend and saw that I’d basically flatlined in the night. However, recent research (by me) has shown that perhaps the phone just didn’t get a reading since I was on a different bed. So, I plan to test it again this coming weekend...and that is my excuse.
2 comments:
Ooooh - I really like the idea of this. I'd love to get a good reading of my sleep.
But - I'm pretty sure I toss & turn so much (and/or have such a hard time getting my neck comfortable) that I couldn't handle having my phone on my pillow with me.
Maybe there's an app to capture how much snow/ice you guys get during SNOWPOCALYPSE 2k11..?
hahahaha. AWESOME! brian tried this app out, too (it's available on the droid as well), and he liked it for like a month and then decided it didn't work as well as he thought it did. i'll be interested to see if you continue to like it. (although, as a side note, he got the free one...and he has read that there are better ones if you're willing to pay for it. which one did you get?)
also - did you hear the snow thunder, or whatever it's called? what did it sound like?! if it makes you feel better, it's 32 degrees here today.
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