How you improve an alarm clock when adding nature sounds, CD players and extraneous features like Bluetooth capability has already been done? Shape it like a flute and make it control your home theater, of course.
That’s the route Bang & Olufsen has taken with the BeoTime, an alarm-clock-cum-remote-control inspired – according to the company’s own PR – by the conflict between night and day in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. A polished aluminum tube comes topped with three tiny square LCD displays to do the time telling, a pop-out lever in one end to activate and deactivate the disarm, and accelerometers within to fire up the backlight with a nudge at night, or trigger the snooze in the morning.
But that’s all the same stuff your Sony Dream Machine did 15 years ago. The real draw for existing Bang & Olufsen customers will be the integrated control pad, which allows the remote to tie into home stereo systems as a remote. It can even be programmed to activate the stereo, TV or lights in the morning to wake you up, or shut them down after a preprogrammed delay at night, like the sleep button on a television.
Like most of the Danish company’s design-savvy fare, the BeoTime carries a rather lofty price tag. It will retail for $375 when it begins showing up in Bang & Olufsen showrooms in August. More information can be found at Bang & Olufsen.
