Whilst this product is itself a great idea I’m afraid that I can’t offer a “glowing” review.
Philips HF3490 Wake Up Light; Nice Idea but Poor Build Quality
The HF-3490 is actually a great idea; An alarm clock that gradually turns on a light half an hour before the alarm goes off, so that when the alarm finally goes off, the room is bright – meaning that you wake up gradually feeling refreshed.
To cap it off, they add an iPod dock, so you can charge your iPod and use your music as an alarm.
It did charge the iPhone 4 and also came with a variety of dock attachments, so the iPhone4 will fit even with a case if you leave the attachments off.
However, I’ve had two of these now from Philips and both suffered from the same bizarre problem – which is that they suddenly started turning the radio on and off randomly. Not only that it then appears to act as though other buttons are being pressed randomly.
As I’ve now looked around reviews on the Internet such as Amazon UK and Amazon US, I’ve found various reviews of this product with people reporting similar problems.
It seems quite likely that the product has a manufacturing fault, so I rang Philips freephone number 0800 331 6015 to try to tell them about the problem. Both times they just couldn’t take my feedback and just sent me back to the place I bought it from (because it was less than 12 months old). In the end, with persistence I got through to somebody in “Consumer Lifestyle” who said that they were unaware of any manufacturing problem – I guess they haven’t seen the online reviews!
In the end I’ve taken this product back to Boots.com and they kindly gave a full refund.
So in summary, this product sounds good, but learn from my mistake and as with other electronic gadgetry, take a look at online reviews before you buy
- www.Amazon.co.uk is a great place to start looking for product reviews.
I’ve just replaced this with a Sony ICF-CL75iP, which admittedly doesn’t have the light feature, but does also charge the iPhone4 with a case on, a review of that product will follow
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[...] Long gone are the days of your web site being the only place online talking about you and your product, now anyone can tweet or blog “I was disappointed with companyname’s product X” (see here for an example of one of this site’s more popular pages!) [...]
[...] Sony ICF-CL75iP Review var addthis_product = 'wpp-262'; var addthis_config = {"data_track_clickback":true,"data_track_addressbar":false};if (typeof(addthis_share) == "undefined"){ addthis_share = [];}Last year, I moved on to the Sony ICF-CL75iP “Dream Machine” after needing something by my bedside to charge my iPhone 4 and having had a terrible time with the Philips Wake Up Lights [...]