Posts Tagged alarm clocks

I’ve long been on a quest to find the perfect travel alarm clock. This Eagle Creek one is still not it, but it comes closer than most.

It seems like designing the perfect travel clock wouldn’t be all that hard: lightweight, small, inexpensive, quiet, dependable, stingy with batteries, and lighted.

It’s the combination of those last two that always seem to throw the designers and this Eagle Creek Multi-function clock fits the pattern. It hits most of the right notes, but doesn’t have a light, which left me, as the Jayhawks say, stumbling through the dark.

“But hey,” they would probably answer, “what were you expecting for $16.50?” (You’ll rarely find it discounted from that, so go with the best shipping option for the online retailers listed at the end of this review.) For that measly price you get an alarm clock with snooze, one-button displays of 16 time zones around the world, the date, calculator/currency exchange and—my favorite extra—a thermometer. (When your bedmate says she’s freezing, you can look up and see if she’s delusional.)

Getting the clock set up is not exactly Apple-intuitive: you’ll definitely need the instruction manual. And the manual is pretty useless when it comes to figuring out the currency conversion function. The battery is included though, so you can get going out of the box and after the initial set-up you can leave it alone until you change time zones. Then when you reset that time zone later, all the others adjust as well.

In normal display state, you see the date, time, and temperature, though oddly the time is displayed as 2-45 instead of 2:45, which still looks odd to me after weeks of use. As mentioned before though, there’s no light—not even one you can press in the middle of the night to see what time it is. So if you want to check the time, you need to take it with you to the bathroom or something.

But the lack of a light is likely because of using a watch battery to keep the weight and size down. The whole thing closes up, clam shell style, for traveling and is less than five inches long. It only weighs a few ounces and it comes with a lifetime warranty.

I’m still looking for that perfect travel alarm clock with all of the above plus a light and easy-to-deduce controls, but until I find it this will work. I just need to keep my Timex Indiglo watch next to it at night…

When I say this travel alarm clock is widely available, don’t take my word for it. Follow these links to shop for it at eBags, Buy.com, REI, or Amazon.