A Good Night’s Sleep: Sleep Cycle iPhone App Review

I don’t tend to have trouble sleeping, or getting up for that matter. However, when I do get up I feel like rubbish and it isn’t a good way to try and start a productive day of working. So when I heard about an application for the iPhone which wakes you at your lightest sleeping point (within a given time range) I had to try it out for myself.

For the past three nights I have used the app, so far concluding that it is a very useful alarm system to help you wake in the mornings as fresh as possible. There are some minor problem and improvements I would like to see, but we shall look at those in the second section of the review.

Sleep Tight, Wake Fresh

The app does exactly what it sets out to do;

An alarm clock that analyses your sleep patterns and wakes you in the lightest sleep phase – a natural way to wake up where you feel rested and relaxed.

So you can’t knock it down there. As well as this it does a great job of showing you your sleeping patterns in the morning, with a nice graph and the time you were asleep for. On the other hand though, it doesn’t give you that many statistics and you can’t really do anything with them. I would like to be able to zoom in at points to see how well you were sleeping at that point in time. Another good feature would be averages of what happens at certain times. For example, at 3 you are always deep asleep, when at 1 you are normally in a very light sleep. I would find this interesting as you could try and think more into it and find out the reasoning.

One thing I am unsure of is how true it can be. All you have to do is put your iPhone face down on the bed and leave it there all night, and then it will measure your sleep by how much you move, so technically you don’t have to be asleep at all! Although it is only 69p, so what can you expect? I’ve woken up feeling fresher each morning, so it’s working in that sense.

 Conclusion

With a few more statistics and options I think this app could be a great one. Currently it does what it needs to do, and it does it well, especially for the price. Adding a few more features would be great, they could even bump up the price, but even without these, I do recommend this product. Even to try it out, you won’t be wasting a lot of money if you choose you don’t like it!