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An iPhone app that can change your life: Sleepcyle

Do you know the feeling of wanting to jump at someones throat the moment that annoying alarm clock rings in the morning, commanding you to leave the cozy warmth of your bed? Hearing the same song over and over to wake you up which at first seemed like the coolest song ever but now that it’s used to rip you out of your sleep every morning you associate aggressions with it?

I’ve always envied people that wake up easily and hated to listen to friends managing to do so many things in a single day (even on weekends) just because they don’t seem to require as much sleep as I do. Really, how unfair is that?! While talking to a friend about it last week, he suggested Sleepcycle to me.

Essentially Sleepcycle is an iPhone app that’ll monitor your sleep activity.  Based on that data it will calculate what sleep phase you are in currently and try to wake you up in the lightest one, causing you to feel more rested when you wake up.

Sounds like mumbojumbo? I thought so too. But when I looked at all the great reviews and saw that for most people the app actually seemed to work, I decided to try it out myself; a price of $0.99 makes it a fairly cheap app anyway.

At first it didn’t seem to register my movement correctly so it looked like I was in deep sleep the whole night. Then I made a few changes and found out that I had actually placed it too close to my pillow causing me to push it away while adjusting my position in sleep. When you position it exactly like this:

It really works and manages to register your sleep activity during the whole night. You’ll be able to look at the data the next day in a graph that’ll usually look something like this:

Now before you go to sleep you can set a time by which you must be awake in the morning. Sleepcycle will try to wake you up in a 30 minute window before that time, right at the point where your activity increases and you aren’t in deep sleep anymore. But in any case it WILL ring at the time you specified before going to bed, even if you are in deep sleep during the entire 30 minute window before.

TIP: If you don’t feel comfortable sleeping with your iPhone next to your head you can just put it in airplane mode!

Oh and, did I mention that Sleepcycle comes with awesome, soft melodies to wake you up without making you look like this? :D

On a more serious note, this app is a great example showing why the iPhone and smartphones in general are revolutionary devices that can enhance our lives. This app made something easier for me that used to bother me my whole live and I’m sure that we’ve barely seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to such apps.

The only thing I’m not too sure about is how the app works when two people share the same bed ;)

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