It sounds like a nightstand clock radio invented and hawked on late night TV by Ron Popeil – it chops, it slices, it dices… well, it does none of those things of course, it’s not a Veg-O-Matic. But the Beddi is an all-in-one kind of device, an “intelligent alarm clock” they call it, that shows you the time, wakes you up, plays FM radio, but wait (as Ron would say…) there’s more! A lot more actually.
OK, let’s see if I can get them all in: it’s a clock with up to four separate alarms; it can play music directly both from an FM radio or Spotify or any other music service on your phone via Bluetooth; it has a mood light and a wake up light; it can generate five different types of white noise including rain and forest; it can charge up to two phones or tablets at a time, one on rapid charge, and also hold one phone in a slot for easy retrieval; it can be programmed to turn off, turn on or dim lights, or turn on appliances such as a coffeemaker, or change the room temperature with an enabled thermostat; it can give weather and traffic reports and even summon an Uber ride. There might be a few more, but I think you get the idea.
Beddi is programmed through an app on your phone, but you don’t need your phone in hand for it to function, as there are three physical buttons that can be programmed for three functions each, depending on whether you give one a single click, a double click, or hold it down for a moment. Of course, there are real buttons for volume and a snooze bar that doubles as a light dimmer. Should you misplace your phone in your room or home, you can program a Beddi button to help you find it.
While the Beddi is sort of an electronic Swiss Army knife – sorry it doesn’t open beer bottles – it is fairly easy to use. Once I downloaded and installed the app, a wizard led me through all the possible settings I could make, and you can always go back to change them individually, or run the wizard again. You may not, well probably not, use all the functions possible with the Beddi (a mood light, really?), but it is good-looking, well-designed, and won’t take up a lot of space on your nightstand, just 8.5 inches across, 4 inches high, and less than 2 inches deep.
The Beddi comes with a power adapter and two cable clips, which gets me to my only criticism. The top slot into which you can place your phone is merely a holder, and if you’re charging the phone, you must plug it into a USB port in the rear. It would have been nice for the Beddi to include an inductive charger, also known as wireless charging, but there may be technical reasons that was not possible without messing up other functions, or making the Beddi much larger.
The Beddi, by the way, was partially funded with Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns.
How much is all this going to cost? Well, if I can summon my inner Ron Popeil: not $300; not $275 or $250; not $225 or $200 or $175; not $150 or even $125. No, just one simple payment of $99.99 at Amazon.com. Veg-O-Matic not included.
The post Beddi – The Swiss Army Knife Bedside Companion appeared first on Tech50+.