The smartphone has replaced lots of gadgets. The music player, the electronic organizer, the flashlight, the alarm clock and, arguably, the portable console and the point and shoot camera.

Smartphones very easily replace the alarm clock. Alarm clock apps on the app store / Google Play are a dime-a-dozen these days. They offer lots of advantages over their forefathers such as being able to choose your own wake-up tunes, decide which RSS feeds or podcasts get read out to you by a robotic voice and added features like dynamic snooze duration and being made to fix arithmetic issues to get up your brain.

These features are very great and all, but they don’t substantially change the way you get up in the morning. Typing in CAPTCHA-like strings while you’re half-sleep half-awake? Snooze duration decreasing after each instance? Meh.

I’ll tell you about an alarm clock app that – besides using the features a standard alarm clock app – helps you get up at just the ideal time (I’ll tell you how in a moment) so you get up comfortably. check it out after the jump!

Developed by Viaden Mobile, smart Alarm is an advanced alarm clock app for iOS gadgets that screens your sleep cycles and, based on that, wakes you up at the best time.

The science of sleep Cycles

What are sleep cycles, you ask? Well, the concept behind sleep cycles is thus: sleep is split into two basic stages light and deep. You alternating between the two during the night. A healthy night’s sleep consists of 4-5 sleep cycles.

But that’s not enough, when you get up is equally important.

Deep sleep is the most helpful to you: it’s when you dream, it’s when your internal battery gets charged the best… but being woken up during this will make you feel groggy, agitated, irritated and just not ready to face the world. Light sleep has the opposite attributes and so waking up during this is best for you.

That’s precisely what smart Alarm does. When you’re in light sleep stage, you tend to step a lot; smart Alarm detects that using your device’s accelerometer and wakes you up!

Smart Alarm’s user Experience

Smart Alarm uses an remarkable user-experience. It’s user-interface is well-designed and intuitive, using five tabs: Alarm, Music, Settings, statistics and More.

Before you set an alarm, you are asked to run a placement test from settings to make sure that it picks up movement at night. From Music, you can pick and choose from a handful of charming built-in tracks to sleep/wakeup to. If you don’t like any of the pre-included tracks, you can always choose your own tracks (paid version only). I’m a big fan of A new Day and Tender Trio.

Finally, you can set your alarm from the Alarm tab. here you can choose between four modes: a basic sleep cycles set alarm mode that wakes you up at the set time, sleep cycles alarm mode, a sleep quality manage mode that screens motions and disturbances and finally the full mode which lets screens sleep stages, disturbing noises and wakes you up around the time you set.

Personal Experience

I’ve been using smart Alarm for the past week on my iphone 4S on iOS 5.1 and can confirm that it works as advertised. I ran the app through a variety of scenarios such as sleeping for just 3 hours at night to sleeping a full 10 hours and everything in between. It woke me up at the ideal stage about 4 out of 5 times. When I woke up, I was refreshed, delighted and inspired enough to prepare for an examination in 4 hours. Whether I completed my preparation and did well in the examination or not is a separate discussion.

The neat statistics tab shows you the different stages of Sleep

I highly recommend smart Alarm to everyone who owns an iOS device and has trouble waking up in the morning. There is a complimentary version [App Store] available that includes limited set of Alarm modes and music selection (which can be unlocked using in-app purchases) and paid version [App Store] that comes without any limitations at all. extra features such as binaural beats, relaxation seems can be gotten with – you guessed it! – in-app purchases.

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