Just give up on using your iPhone as an alarm clock

One of the running jokes about the iPhone is that it’s amazing, unless you actually want to use it as a phone. I guess it doesn’t make a reliable alarm clock either.

iPhone owners already encountered an alarm problem back in November, when the switch to Daylight Savings Time caused some repeating iPhone alarms to go off an hour late. Apparently, the New Year’s switch has caused problems as well — and they were even worse, since the alarms didn’t go off at all (rather than just being delayed), and they affected iPhone owners who set their alarms manually (not just the ones who relied on an automatically repeating schedule).

I haven’t seen any concrete numbers on how many iPhones (and other Apple devices) were affected, but Reuters has a rundown of many of the complaints found on Twitter. An Apple spokesperson told Reuters on Sunday that after problems over the weekend, the alarm would be fixed today. Yet some iPhone owners said their alarms failed again this morning.

You can add me to the list of people affected. My alarm didn’t go off yesterday, but luckily there was no pressing reason for me to wake up. This morning it worked just fine — until I hit the snooze button and overslept anyway.

While the iPhone alarm problems are getting plenty of coverage, they probably aren’t as embarrassing as “Antennagate,” where Apple decided to offer free iPhone cases to offset reception problems with the iPhone 4. Yet the phones sold like crazy, and Apple couldn’t manufacture them quickly enough.

[image via Flickr/Alan Cleaver]