Amazon Halo Rise - Bedside Sleep Tracker with Wake-up Light and Smart Alarm

Before buying this product, I was familiar with the concept of sleeping with your sleep cycles, and I'd tried several times over to do this in an effort to get my best sleep. When I was successful, it was great, but more often than not I just couldn't get the timing right and I would still wake up tired. Last year I used an app on my phone which had many features similar to the Halo, but more often than not by the time I was going to go to bed, I was so tired I'd forget to turn the alarm on. Sure when I used it it was great, but the problem was actually doing it.Then a few weeks before its release, I saw this bad boy appear in my recommends on Amazon, and I was immediately interested. I did try to look for alternatives because I was put off by what I thought was a high price and a subscription to boot, but the closest I came was a really cool smart ring that both cost over $500 and had an even more expensive subscription. I had been interested in a Kickstarter project years ago that touted to do similar things as this clock, but the reviews weren't great and it wasn't being sold anymore. Needless to say, I decided to preorder the Halo and give it a shot.It has been incredible.I'm a night owl by nature and always have been, and unfortunately it means keeping a regular sleep schedule is near impossible. Still, I'd do my best to get 4-6 hours a night, but that would be offset by the near two hours of alarms I'd have to set every morning just to eventually force myself awake. So sure, I might have gotten four hours of sleep, but with two hours of alarms, it was hardly so. I was unrested and miserable, like I always had been when waking up in the morning, and I was tired of it (not to mention tired in general). And then my Halo smart alarm clock arrived, and boy has it changed my life -- or at the very least my mornings.For weeks I've gotten better sleep than I could have ever imagined while working a full time job. I almost always wake up to the sunlight halo, and the alarm eventually goes off and tells me it's really time to get up. I've gotten in the bad habit of snoozing the alarm, but unlike my old phone alarms which would go off dozens of times before I could actually wake up, the Halo only takes me two or three times maximum to get me actually up and out of bed. Sure, it can't work miracles if I only get two hours of sleep, but regardless I feel better rested and ready to go. I've bragged about this device to everyone I know, shown them my sleep statistics, explained to them the concept of Lidar. It's hard for me to communicate in a single review just how much I love this device and how much better I feel using it as my alarm clock. There's no more remembering to set alarms, worrying about whether or not I'll actually wake up when I intend to. I just have to remember to make it to my bed before I fall asleep, and I know I'll wake up when I need to be up. Truly it's incredible.If the mere effect alone isn't great enough, the real thing that seals the deal for me with this device is the way that it works and the fact that it works for privacy-conscious people. As someone who works in IT and has been a computer enthusiast his entire life, I get a pang of anxiety every time I see the words "Privacy Policy" and "Terms and Conditions". I hate when companies collect analytics. I hate that companies sell data. And unfortunately, it's something that's dang near unavoidable in today's world. So I really do appreciate when a company or product development team does their best to make an IoT device or software as private as possible. The fact that this device uses what I presume is Lidar or a similar technology rather than a camera or microphone to track the user without producing an image of them or their phone screen, or listening to every muttered word, is groundbreaking, and it's definitely the nail on the head that made me take the plunge and buy the Halo. I don't feel that this device has invaded my bedside but instead that it's simply an appliance doing what it's designed to do, and that's such a good, relieving feeling to have in the modern day.The only complaint that I have about this device is the fact that the Halo subscription is not included or discounted with Prime, and it is necessary for the smart alarm. However, I figured it comes with six free months and if it worked well enough I'd continue it, and I am definitely convinced. Halo also includes a few other really nice features such as bedtime stories and meditations, as well as a body composition tracker, so I suppose those are also there to make the purchase a bit more worth it.If you have to wake up to an alarm and want better sleep, buy this device. If you want to track your sleep and see how well it's going, buy this device. If you're into really expensive clocks then heck buy this device! It's well worth the purchase, and well-deserving of a full five stars.

like any amazon piece of tech, the halo rise is something that promises you the moon, but in actual use feels very much feels like it needs further development to be truly useful.the good:1. the wake-up light is bright.2. the sleep stories are the right mix of soothing & boring.3. unit is unobtrusive enough.4. app allows some customization.the bad:1. the 5th night it completely missed beginning half of my sleep, only started in the middle of the night for some reason?2. dimmest setting for clock (1%) is still too bright in a dark room, guess i’ll have to add a colored gel to dim it further?3. as far as using the light for an alarm, i’m usually awake already, but be aware it defaults to starting 20 minutes before alarm set time. you can customize this in the app. i just moved my wake time by 15 minutes so it doesn’t start until i’m really ready to get up. even dim ramping up light in a dark cool bedroom is enough.4. the adaptive waking based on your actual sleep cycle before wake/alarm time is only available w/ the annoying audio alarm. it would be nice if they added the light to behave the same way, possible future feature update?5. can you ever really ignore the “ick” factor & just go ahead & trust amazon isn’t going to give in to the extreme temptation to do something w/ your personal data? probably not. ah well.6. time zone jumble: in an attempt to ignore the hideous, unwanted disaster that our esteemed gov’t officials jam down our throats known as “daylight saving time”, i set the time zone to chicago/central time, even though physically i’m in new york/eastern zone. great, the clock shows the un-monkeyed-with real/solar time i want! except … all my sleep data uses the enforced changed time, so it’s unnecessarily confusing. (i have to create an entirely duplicate set of automation commands for alexa, which i prefix w/ “dst”, to run them when i actually want them to happen. “real/solar” time commands have to be deactivated for the duration. @ least this kludgy system sorta works?) sure, the optimal solution is to get the j*ck*ss representative critters to stop messing w/ the clocks & listen to the science/doctors/sleep professionals, but so far they’re aiming to do the exact opposite & screw things up even further by “moving” noon an hour all year long by making dst permanent. wrong move, ya clowns. maybe stop stuffing your pockets w/ lobbyists’ $$$$$ for a minute & do something right for a change? i’m waiting.7. the auto-advance of the sleep stories doesn’t allow you to skip a night or replay a story, it wants to automatically advance anyhow, so you have to miss a story instead. maybe that would be a story i’d want to save to repeat in the future or add to a select playlist? sorry, no deviation allowed.8. app is portrait only, they assume you’re using a phone? if you’re on a tablet & prefer landscape mode you’re out of luck. writing this review w/in the rise app was a tortuous experience. you can’t see enough of what you already typed to review it & get a feel for the flow, for instance. what can i say, i’m old school that way?9. i paid $99.99 (intro price) of my own hard-earned ca$h for this. $139.99 full price seems steep, but everything’s expen$ive these days, whaddaya gonna do?10. comes w/ 6-month halo membership, after that you’ll have to pay a dreaded monthly subscription fee to use what @ 1st glance seems to be a bunch of useless added gobbledygoop. yeah sorry, i’m only occasionally a zoomer in spirit, so that subscription nonsense don’t float my boat? i suppose it would be interesting to compare experiences w/ somebody who buys into the “enhanced” functionality of all the add-on stuff the app has available, if anybody actually bothered to go all-in? i understand nutrition & exercise affects your sleep, but i don’t see much advantage to bundling all that into the halo app? maybe there’s some advantage beyond having things that they can make subscription only that will snag the folks that always want to go all in (an urge i can understand & am taken in by in many situations myself). it also seems some of the features are actually for the halo band. the halo rise sleep functions are all included in the basic, non-subscription plan, so maybe you don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen after free subscription runs out on 6 months?if you’re not the early adopter type you might wanna wait & see if they make it closer to the magic of what’s promised, but judging by how alexa/echo devices seem to get worse as time passes in general & specifically the more you try to get them to do what you want them to do, instead of just what they think you want them to do or what they want you to use them for (hint: mindlessly buy more stuff!).tl/dr: if you’re hands-on & like to tweak things to see if they’ll do what you want, give it a go. needs more development to really be useful. i’m pleased enough to have gotten it to explore what it might be able to do.