Alarmo is the quintessential Nintendo product: It’s a fun and quirky spin on a bedside alarm clock (with a motion sensor!) that mines your love for everything Nintendo. It’s a $100 device entirely meant to surprise and delight you. But there are also usability issues that make me think the company’s engineers haven’t encountered any modern gadgets over the past decade (which is how long they’ve been developing Alarmo).
Here’s an example: There’s no easy way to input your Wi-Fi password if you ever want to download new themes. Instead you have to patiently spin its bulbous top button until you land on the character you need, then press it down like Mario squashing a Goomba. That may not sound like much of an issue, especially since you may only need to do it once, but it’s needlessly frustrating if you have a complex password with multiple letter cases, numbers and symbols. My password is all lowercase letters, thankfully, but it still took me three minutes to punch it in. Instead of getting some rest, it just made me want to throw Alarmo out of my window(-o).
Nintendo
Alarmo brings a dose of Nintendo fun into your bedroom, with sleep noises and motion sensing alarms featuring classic Nintendo characters. It’s expensive, though, and its sleep tracking is mostly useless.
But then I had it lull me to sleep with the sounds of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. At 6:30am, rascally Koroks roused me from my slumber and made their telltale noises as I shuffled around my bed. And once I got up, they performed Hestu’s traditional celebratory dance, much to the chagrin of my sleeping cats. All was forgiven.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
So, what is Alarmo?
Nobody actually needs Alarmo (officially dubbed the “Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo”), but its appeal to Nintendo fans is obvious. It wouldn’t be out of place as a prop in Mario Odyssey, with its cartoonishly round, red case, nubby feet and prominent control knob (which glows, naturally). Its 2.8-inch screen is surprisingly small and square, not round like some of Nintendo’s promotional videos make it seem, and its speakers are loud enough to fill even large bedrooms with undistorted nostalgia bombs. Controlling it is relatively simple: Twist and push the knob, or use the back button to return to the previous screen. You can also view notifications, like updates on your sleep cycle, by tapping the message button.
I’ll admit my bias: I was practically raised on Nintendo consoles, so it’s almost as if Alarmo was built specifically for someone like me. I don’t really mind that Alarmo’s large red case doesn’t really fit with the clean aesthetic of my bedroom. But I’m sure it’ll be a tougher sell if you’re sharing a bed with someone less Nintendo-pilled. (More on that below.)
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While Alarmo is mostly pitched as an alarm clock with Nintendo themes — at launch, there are sounds and characters from Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 3, Pikmin 4 and (strangely enough) Ring Fit Adventure — it also adds a bit of Nintendo charm throughout your day. Alarmo can produce hourly chimes, and also play “Sleepy Sounds” related to your theme. For Breath of the Wild, that includes the crackling of a campfire, nocturnal animals and delightful snippets of the game’s score. (I could be mistaken, but it also sounds like there’s a bit of score from the moments before a Blood Moon arrives. I hope Nintendo snips that out eventually — nobody wants to go to bed dreading a Blood Moon.)
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
Does Alarmo actually work?
As an alarm clock, Alarmo gets the job done. It managed to wake me up successfully every day over the past week, and it did so far less jarringly than my iPhone’s blaring speaker. It simply felt pleasant to be welcomed into the world by Koroks and Mario. Every toss and turn triggered more sound effects, which slowly nudged me awake. In its default “Steady Mode,” Alarmo also gets progressively louder the longer you stay in bed, and more nefarious characters like Bowser might make an appearance. But if you just want things to stay super chill, there’s also a “Gentle Mode” that doesn’t escalate noise. Alarmo also responds to the mere act of getting out of bed with a huge celebration — honestly, it’s about time someone recognized the effort.
While Nintendo provides some rudimentary sleep statistics, based on Alarmo’s motion sensing and your alarm settings, they’re mostly useless. I think my numbers may have been skewed by my three cats, who sleep on my bed for most of the day, and may be triggering the device’s motion sensor. I certainly wish I could have slept for the 17 hours it recorded at one point. (I’m lucky to get six hours these days.) Even if Alarmo’s sleep-tracking was functional, there’s not much you can do with the data, since it’s all stuck on the device. That’s one of many areas where having a separate app would have been useful. (You’d think it would work with Pokemon Sleep, but no!)
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
Another issue? Alarmo’s unique motion sensing technology is only made for a single sleeper (just like Google’s latest Nest Hub). If you’re in bed beside a partner or unruly kids, Nintendo recommends switching to “Button mode,” where you have to tap the top knob to disable the alarm. At least it’s easy to change Alarmo’s modes, and if you leave the sensor on by mistake, it’s not the end of the world when it actually goes off. You’ll hear a bit more noise than usual, but you can still hit the top button to quiet things down.
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Setting up Alarmo
There are only three things inside Alarmo’s box: The device itself, a USB Type A to USB-C cable and a small instruction booklet. Notably missing is a USB power adapter. That’s something we’ve grown used to with smartphones and some of Nintendo’s handhelds, but not bundling one is still a pain for anyone who doesn’t have spare power adapters. I can just imagine a parent trying to set up Alarmo for their eager child, only to be delayed for a day because they need to run out and buy a separate adapter. That’s not surprising and delightful, Nintendo. It’s just annoying.
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The actual onboarding process is pretty straightforward. Once you plug it in, Alarmo teaches you how to use its top dial and button, and explains how the back button works. You can also rotate the dial to adjust its volume and the device directs you to wave your hand in front of it to test its motion sensing. You have to direct Alarmo’s orientation towards your bed and make sure it has a clear view of your sleeping area at the edge of a nightstand or table. The motion sensing won’t work if it’s too high.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
To finish off the setup process, you have to lay down and make sure Alarmo can actually detect your movement. That worked without much fuss on my end, but when it asked me to sit up and lean in a specific direction, there was a delay of a few minutes before it noticed correctly when I was leaning to the right.
At the very least, Nintendo didn’t force me to connect to Wi-Fi during the initial setup. Instead, that’s triggered when you choose to update its themes, and the entire process required is just frustrating, as I described above. Now, it’s not as if Nintendo hasn’t learned to use QR codes via websites and apps to simplify logins. You also have to sign in to your Nintendo account once Alarmo is connected to Wi-Fi, but I was thankfully able to use a QR code to do so over my iPhone.
I suppose Nintendo wanted to have a simpler onboarding experience for Alarmo, one that didn’t require external authentication or an additional app. But that desire for simplicity still leads to needless frustration.
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It would be nice to see a wider selection of themes, as well. I’m not sure many Nintendo fans are clamoring to re-experience the characters and music from Ring Fit Adventure, after all. Where’s Kirby? Where’s Mario Kart? If there’s room for Splatoon and Pikmin, there should be room for Nintendo’s more iconic franchises.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
Is Alarmo worth it?
I’m no stranger to tech-infused alarms. My nightstand is already overloaded with gadgets, including an Amazon Echo Dot (which I use to play radio stations), an older Phillips SmartSleep rise light, a Homedics white noise machine, my iPhone 15 Pro Max (charging on a Belkin MagSafe stand) and a Hatch Baby video monitor. As much as I appreciated having bits of Nintendo magic in my bedroom, I didn’t love it enough to replace any of the devices I’m already using.
But my daughter Sophia is another story. We’ve played through most of Tears of the Kingdom together, and I’ve done my best to teach her in the ways of Nintendo. (I’ll save the issues with the company’s extreme litigiousness for when she’s older.) She’s eager to use Alarmo to wake up on her own, without my early-morning badgering. She also loves Koroks, so I’m pretty sure the Zelda theme will be permanently enabled. At least, until Kirby arrives.
I’m not going to try and justify the need for a $100 alarm clock. If you’re a big enough Nintendo fan, you’ve probably already locked in your pre-order. And there’s a chance it’ll become more compelling over time, if Nintendo manages to add themes and drive down the price. For now, though, it’s a reminder that Nintendo can do more than just churn out consoles and games. There’s still room for the company to take weird swings, it’s just too bad Alarmo is expensive and imperfect.
It’s the end of an era for one of the App Store’s earliest success stories. Foursquare is shutting down its signature city guide app in order to “focus our efforts on building an even better experience in Swarm,” the company said in . The app will shut down December 15, while the web version will stay online until “early 2025.”
The shutdown is a notable reversal of a strategy the company announced a decade ago when it, controversially, opted its famed “check-in” service into a separate app. That app became known as Swarm while the Foursquare-branded app became a “” full of user-generated reviews and local recommendations.
Now, Foursquare says its future is, once again, the check-in. “We’re also introducing exciting new features and capabilities into Swarm throughout the year (👀 some of which may look familiar to you) in order to unlock new use cases that may better support your needs,” the company said, adding that additional updates are expected “early next year.”
It’s not clear why the company is changing its strategy to elevate Swarm over its namesake app. The company more than 100 employees earlier this year in an effort to “streamline” operations. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, who is currently co-chair of the company’s board of directors, said in a post that the company is “doing fine,” though he expressed disappointment with the news. “I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I have been in a real funk these last few days over this news,” he wrote.
T-minus 7 days until TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 officially kicks off! One of the year’s biggest tech events is ready to dominate the Bay Area’s thriving tech landscape for almost the entire week.
Get ready for one of the biggest tech gatherings, taking place October 28-30 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Tech experts from every corner of the globe will come together to engage with the latest innovations, learn trends, and connect through unparalleled networking.
Why you can’t miss Disrupt 2024
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Though it remains very unclear whether any of the self-driving vehicles demoed at Tesla’s We, Robot presentation will ever actually make it to market, one of the production companies behind Blade Runner 2049thinks Elon Musk ripped off their copyright for the event, and are taking him to court.
Today, Alcon Entertainment — an LA-based production company behind Blade Runner 2049 — filed a lawsuit against Tesla, Elon Musk, and Warner Bros. Discovery alleging that an AI image generator was used to create promotional art for the We, Robot event that was meant to resemble stills from the 2017 sci-fi film. According to Alcon, which also owns the copyright to Blade Runner 2049, WBD and Tesla sent a request to use imagery from the film on the afternoon of October 10th just hours before the We, Robot demo took place on the Warner Bros. lot in California.
Though WBD owns some licensing rights for Blade Runner 2049, because the event would be live-streamed internationally, clearance for the images had to come from Alcon directly. And when Alcon’s legal and licensing departments were made aware of the situation, they sent back a firm refusal to the interested parties “so that there would be no mistakes in the conduct of the event.”
“Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account,” Alcon’s suit explains. “Alcon did not want BR2049 to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
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Despite Alcon’s refusal, however, Tesla allegedly decided to feed shots from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to create “a lightly stylized fake screen still screen”which was displayed prominently during the We, Robot presentation. During the event, Musk mentioned the Blade Runner franchise by name while describing sci-fi depictions of the future, and the livestream cut to an image depicting a man wearing a duster jacket and standing in front of a ruinous, apocalyptic cityscape.
An image from Tesla’s We, Robot event.Tesla
Along with the larger copyright infringement, Alcon also says it was never made privy to any of the agreements between Tesla and WBD that would have been necessary before the We, Robot event. Along with giving Tesla the ability to use Warner Bros.’ lot and equipment, Alcon believes that agreement also included a promotional element that “allowed or possibly even required Tesla expressly to affiliate the Cybercab with one or more motion pictures” from the studio’s catalog.
Alcon’s suit doesn’t specify exactly how much money the company is seeking in damages, but it states clearly that it believes Musk, Tesla, and WBD all “understood the unauthorized nature of the image and the improper purpose behind it and encouraged or otherwise lent their support to the improper endeavor.”
Midjourney’s AI image creator is adding major new editing options to its platform, as announced by CEO David Holz on Discord. You’ll be able to edit an uploaded image using generative AI, as you could only do with images that AI has created until now. Notably, this will be a web-based tool, expanding Midjourney’s Discord-centered and exclusive features.
While AI editing tools for images have been around for a bit, they are almost always restricted to images created with the same AI model doing the editing. Midjourney is taking the leap into allowing you to edit an image you want to edit rather than having the model make the initial creation.
That’s technically impressive since it means the model must understand more about an image that it didn’t design from scratch. However, it may also be risky since other models may have held back from providing it as an option due to concern over people using it to mess with pictures of real people without their permission or to employ the AI for less-than-benevolent purposes.
Once the image is uploaded, you can edit it in several ways. You can zoom in or out, adjust the angle, and otherwise play with the image without needing Discord and with just a single command. You can also use a digital brush for inpainting, allowing for more precise modifications. The most notable new element is the Retexture feature, which lets you precisely alter colors and other details while keeping the image’s shapes and objects intact.
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Midjourney Edits the Future
Questions about the ethics of the creation and editing of AI images have led to heated debates, lawsuits, and other arguments. That makes Midjourney’s decisions important for how its rivals and regulators figure out rules to set up internally and for the industry. Midjourney has agreed to embed metadata in AI-generated images so that they can always be identified, though not the more comprehensive C2PA standard as of yet. These are issues that Midjourney is well aware of.
“Because these new features are so powerful we’re going to restrict the deployment of them to a subset of the current community and increase our human moderation over the outputs (there’s also new more advanced AI moderators which we feel will do a great job),” Holz wrote. “Honestly, we’re not sure how to precisely restrict deployment of this feature, so we want to put a survey out there and get your opinions. We’ll use these results to calculate what percentage of the userbase we’ll reach with different restrictions and try to balance accessibility vs volume.”
For the average user, the ability to easily manipulate images with AI could make using Midjourney more appealing and make photo editing a lot easier. And as AI image makers become more common Midjourney wants to be more accessible. That’s why the company decided to abandon Discord as its only outlet, though it’s still a major center for the company’s creations. Midjourney likely doesn’t want to be left out simply because some don’t want to sign up for Discord.
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Meta has said it’s going to utilize facial recognition technology in a bid to crack down on celebrity scam ads that plague its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
The move comes three years after Meta removed facial recognition smarts from Facebook following a backlash against the technology. Meta will be hoping that the implementation of the system, and the reason for bringing it in, will be better received by its online communities this time around.
“Scammers often try to use images of public figures, such as content creators or celebrities, to bait people into engaging with ads that lead to scam websites, where they are asked to share personal information or send money,” Meta explained in a post announcing the move to reintroduce facial recognition technology.
Meta already has a system in place for detecting scam ads involving celebrities, but it’s now aiming to make it more robust. Moving forward, if it suspects an ad to be a potential scam and it contains the image of a public figure at risk of celeb-bait, it will deploy facial recognition technology to compare faces in the ad to the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures. If it confirms a match and concludes that the ad is a scam, Meta will block it.
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In a bid to steer clear of the same kind of criticisms that prompted Meta to ditch a form of facial recognition technology three years ago that involved automatic photo-tagging of Facebook users, the company said it will delete any facial data generated from ads for the one-time comparison, regardless of whether its system finds a match, adding that it won’t use the data for any other purpose.
The company said that early testing with a small group of celebrities and public figures shows promising results. Next, it will enroll a wider pool of celebrities that have been used in celeb-bait scams. Those selected will be notified, and they can opt out of the system at any time.
Meta said it’s also testing facial recognition technology as a way for people to verify their identity and regain access to Facebook and Instagram accounts if they forget their password, lose their device, or are tricked into giving their password to a scammer.
At the current time, owners of compromised accounts need to verify their identity to regain access by uploading an official ID or an official certificate that shows their name.
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But Meta said it’s now testing “video selfies” as a way for people to verify their identity and regain access to their account.
“The user will upload a video selfie and we’ll use facial recognition technology to compare the selfie to the profile pictures on the account they’re trying to access,” the company explained, adding that the system is “similar to identity verification tools you might already use to unlock your phone or access other apps.”
Uploaded video selfies will be encrypted and stored securely and will never appear on any Meta platform. The video will also be deleted immediately by Meta once it’s been used to verify a user’s identity.
“Video selfie verification expands on the options for people to regain account access, only takes a minute to complete and is the easiest way for people to verify their identity,” Meta said. “While we know hackers will keep trying to exploit account recovery tools, this verification method will ultimately be harder for hackers to abuse than traditional document-based identity verification.”
Google continues to work on making Gemini the ultimate AI-powered assistant for mobile devices. Lately, the service has been gaining features that were previously only available on the classic Google Assistant. New findings suggest that Gemini may soon receive the ability to manage calls and messages on locked devices.
Both Gemini and Google Assistant are capable of making calls and sending text messages via voice commands. However, currently, only Google Assistant can do so on phones with the screen locked. A new Gemini option that enables such actions from the lock screen could soon change that.
You could then make calls and send messages with Gemini from locked devices
Gemini is already capable of offering responses to requests via voice commands with the screen locked, but the call and message management function is still missing. That is one of the features that keeps Google Assistant “alive.” However, Android Authority has enabled a switch to trigger calls and messages from Gemini on locked devices in the latest Google app beta (v15.42.30.28.arm64).
You can access the switch from the same section where you grant Gemini permission to perform other actions while the screen is locked. Still, the feature will require you to unlock the device under certain conditions. “Gemini will still ask you to unlock when a response contains personal content, such as your Gmail messages, from apps you use,” the option says.
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New minimalist floating overlay and extension categories
The source has identified a few additional potential changes for Gemini. First, it seems that Google wants to make the assistant’s floating overlay much more minimalistic. To achieve this, they are significantly reducing the size of the floating overlay, a move that makes sense as it allows for a larger percentage of the background UI to remain visible. The floating overlay will expand according to the number of words your prompt contains.
Minimalist floating overlay
Additionally, Google is rearranging the Gemini extensions into different categories. Initially, the few Gemini extensions available made it possible to have them all in one list, in no apparent order. However, as the service is receiving more and more extensions, it is more convenient to include an organizational system. This will help you find current and future extensions more easily. There are categories like “communication,” “device control,” “travel,” “media,” and “productivity.”
There are no details on when Google might push these new features to Gemini. It’s even possible that we will never see some of the spotted changes implemented.
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