Review: Is Nintendo’s Alarmo Interactive Clock a Tool or a Toy?

Nintendo fans have been anxiously waiting for Nintendo to reveal its newest piece of hardware, and the company responded on October 9th, 2024 with a surprise video announcement of… an alarm clock?! Following the announcement, the interactive sound clock named Alarmo went on sale for $99 USD through Nintendo’s website, exclusively to those with a Nintendo Switch Online account. (It is also currently available for purchase at the Nintendo New York store, and it will come to other retailers in early 2025 without the Nintendo Switch Online account requirements.)

We’ll have to wait just a bit longer for the Switch successor console to be revealed, but in the meantime, Nintendo has – out of left field – given fans a new product to consider adding to our daily routine. My Nintendo-phile family bought two Alarmo on release day, and they shipped to our home in just a few days. The following is an in-depth product review based on my own direct experience with the clock after a couple weeks, supplemented with input from my wife and son. I’ll seek to provide an answer to the question of whether Alarmo is a tool or toy, particularly one that is worth buying.

 

Key Features

Alarmo is marketed by Nintendo as a sound clock that makes waking up fun. Three significant differences it has compared to other alarm clocks are the sights & sounds used for the alarm, the motion sensor built into the clock, and the variable sound levels of the alarm that progressively increase if snoozed.

Rather than being distressingly jarred awake, your day can gently start with invigorating songs and sound effects from one of five best-selling Nintendo Switch video games. For Zelda fans, the inclusion of Breath of the Wild is likely the most appealing, but also packed in are Pikmin 4, Ring Fit Adventure, Splatoon 3, and Super Mario Odyssey. Each of the five games have seven sounds to be used as an alarm, making for 35 in total. Also available are five shuffle options, each including only the seven sounds from each game, and an overall shuffle option using all 35 sounds.

Alarmo is also capable of connecting to the internet, allowing for more games to be added in the future. At the end of Nintendo’s announcement video, two free future updates were teased: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, respectively. Perhaps more games – even more Zelda games – will come after that.

For Zelda fans, the seven sounds included from Breath of the Wild are:

• Awakening to Adventure with Zelda saying “Wake up Link” and “Open your eyes”
• Bokoblin Battle with the grunts and snarls of Link’s familiar foes
• Stasis Trial with boulders rolling and Shrine music in the background
• Searching for Korok Seeds with the Stable theme song in the background
• Great Fairy Fountain with the familiar tune of that name joined by oohs and aahs
• Stone Talus Battle with the lumbering geologic giant challenging Link
• Learning to Become the Wind with Link taking flight with the paraglider

When a Zelda alarm sound is set, Link will grace the screen of the clock throughout the day in his blue Champion’s Tunic. He’ll pace across the screen and occasionally drop in from the top of the screen with his Paraglider.

Alarmo is being put forth as a “hands-free” device that uses its built-in motion sensor for managing snoozing and stopping the alarm on a daily basis (though buttons can be used as back-up or exclusively in an alternative Button Mode). If the clock notices a sufficient level of movement indicative of you starting to wake up, it will snooze the alarm giving you a few moments of silence to finish waking up. If the clock then senses you getting out of bed and leaving its Sensor Zone, it will turn the alarm off and provide a celebratory sound effect to congratulate you on being a responsible human being and starting your day.

If, however, you doze back off to sleep instead of getting out of bed, the alarm volume and its pulsating light will intensify after 20 minutes to provide extra encouragement to get going. The Zelda-themed version of this feature is the Guardian alert music, with sound effects of its laser taking aim at you. That music always puts me on edge with a shot of adrenaline. However, it should be noted that this feature is viewed more as a last resort when more gentle prods have gone unheeded. Alarmo would much prefer to have you get up after the first snooze even if it takes a few minutes.

Also available are Sleepy Sounds, which are soothing sound effects that will play at a set time when you typically go to bed in order to help you fall asleep. They only play for a short span (only ten minutes on the Version 1.0 software, or five minutes if you’ve updated to Version 2.0) and don’t go all night. When a Zelda alarm sound is set, the associated Sleepy Sounds and screen display are of Link sitting by a campfire to help ease your mind as you close your eyes.

 

Unboxing and Setup Impressions

Alarmo appears to be made from high-quality materials and is well built. Inside the box is a USB-A to USB-C cable. However, the clock does not include an adapter for plugging it into a wall outlet. You’ll need to plug it into a USB-A port or find your own adapter that provides 5V/1.5A/7.5W of power. (I used some old smartphone adapters that met the power requirements.)

I was able to set up our two Alarmo with relative ease, as the prompts are easy to understand and user-friendly. The clock itself – and thus its screen – is rather small in size; I didn’t realize how small it was until holding it in my hands. The most prominent physical feature of the clock is the turn dial on top for cycling through options, which also serves as a button to be pressed down for confirmations. The dial also lights up whenever the alarm sounds and pulsates in different colors. There are two other buttons on top for going back and viewing notifications.

Based on its size, I quickly learned that Alarmo is meant to be in an easily visible location from your bed, such as on your bedside night stand, not on a piece of furniture on the other side of the room. This is further reinforced with the setup process, where you input the clock’s general location in relation to your bed both in terms of distance and angle. The horizontal distance from the edge of your bed that you can input into Alarmo ranges from a minimum of zero inches to a maximum of 20 inches (or approximately 50 centimeters). While you can obviously physically place it even farther away if you wish, in my experience, the reliability of the motion sensor decreases as the horizontal distance increases beyond the 20-inch maximum. The setup process also encourages you to place the clock a vertical distance of eight inches (or approximately 20 centimeters) above the surface of your bed.

 

Room for Improvement (and Potential Future Opportunities)

Alarmo has many great things about it, but I believe Nintendo missed some easy opportunities to make it the best product possible. However, all of my critiques center on software, so perhaps they can be addressed in future downloadable updates. (Nintendo, if you are reading this, here’s my wishlist!)

One of my main concerns is that Alarmo does not allow for multiple alarms, which is a basic feature that just about every smartphone on the market has out of the box. What Alarmo does include is a singular alarm that you can set to go off at the same time on certain days of the week. This is sufficient, for example, if you get up at the same time of day Monday through Friday, and sleep in on the weekends without an alarm. But what if you have a hybrid work schedule where you go into the office a few days a week and then work others from home? On the office days, you may need to wake up a little earlier to account for the commute; meanwhile, you can sleep a little extra on the work-from-home days but still need an alarm to be up and at your home office desk at a certain time. Many other scenarios come to mind. If Nintendo is marketing Alarmo as an alarm clock, basic customizable features like multiple alarms should have been included in my opinion.

Another oversight is that the screen dims at night when it does not detect any movement, such that the screen is almost completely black. The screen will come back when it detects movement if you need to get up for a glass of water or to use the restroom. However, there are also times when you wake up and just need to know what time it is without getting up. Do I have a handful of more hours to fall back asleep and get more rest, or will my alarm be going off in a couple minutes and I might as well get going? With a black screen, you can’t tell. For those with partners who share a bed, you may not want to potentially disturb and wake up your partner by creating movement just to get Alarmo to recognize you and light up. It would be nice to have an option to include an always-on low-light setting for night time.

The inclusion of Sleepy Sounds was a great feature, but having it only for a short, fixed time duration that is unable to be customized was a poor decision in my opinion. For those who prefer white noise when going to sleep, Sleepy Sounds could have met that need in an integrated device. I really enjoy the campfire noises included when a Zelda alarm sound is set. Nintendo could have provided an option to set a time duration for Sleepy Sounds to play and allowed it to go much longer in terms of hours. Another design option could have been to use the motion sensor to determine whether you have likely gone to sleep. Perhaps if 15 minutes has passed with no movement, it could then turn the Sleepy Sounds off until the morning alarm sounds.

My last critique is the desire to have a higher level of customization on the shuffle option for alarm sounds. Two examples for me would have been the ability to pick which of the seven Zelda sounds I would like to rotate through instead of being forced to use all seven sounds. I enjoy six of the seven alarm sounds, but the oohs and aahs of the “Great Fairy Fountain” alarm sound are something I can do without. Another example is the ability to pick two (or more) of the five video games to shuffle together rather than being forced to use all five games. I’m a big fan of Super Mario Odyssey as well, and I would have loved the option to pick a customized shuffle that would rotate between Mario and Link.

 

The Final Thoughts

To answer the question of whether Alarmo is a tool or toy, I would say that it is both but leans more toward the toy side of things. If you are an avid Nintendo fan who enjoys collecting official products and has disposable income, there is a good chance you’ll enjoy Alarmo and still find it useful despite the shortcomings I presented in this review.

However, if you are looking for an alarm clock with a suite of useful customizable features at a reasonable price, I would encourage you to look elsewhere. It’s hard to justify the $99 USD price tag with its current features. Maybe in time, with future free updates, it can be refined to improve its software and offer more sounds from a larger pool of video game franchises.

Pros:

• Sights and sounds from fan favorites like Zelda and Mario
• Hands-free daily operation through motion sensors
• Variable alarm sounds for a more gentle and pleasant wake-up experience
• Sleepy Sounds to help you drift off at bedtime
• User-friendly and intuitive setup
• Promise of future free updates with more sounds from other video games

Cons:

• Small screen size
• Needs one to be close to bed for motion sensor to work properly
• Lacks ability to set multiple alarms
• Lacks always-on display setting for low-light
• Sleepy Sounds duration is short and cannot be customized
• Shuffle option doesn’t allow for selecting a subset of alarm sounds within a single game or combining two (or more) games

I hope Nintendo remains committed to this product and continually improves its software so that some of these cons can be shifted into the pros column.

This leaves us with our final rating.

Score: 7/10

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What did you think of Alarmo based on Nintendo’s video announcement? Were you able to order one online and test it out as part of your daily routine? Did it meet your expectations as a tool while still having that Nintendo charm? Let us know all of your thoughts in the comments below!