Hasta La Gadget!

A new iPhone dock and speaker from iLuv offers an unusual twist. A literal twist, even. It turns the iPhone 90-degrees and holds it, charging, in landscape orientation. By day, this isn’t so useful, but by night, it means that the screen can display a big clock so you can know the exact times you wake up cold and sweating from your many fevered nightmares.

The hardware is called the iMM190 App Station and it pairs with a free iPhone application called iLuv App Clock. They collaborate to lull you to sleep at night with your own music library, wake you in the morning with your choice of sounds and all the while tell you the time and weather (so you can decide whether it is worth getting out of bed). The iMM190 can be used upright or horizontally and powered from either the mains or from six AA batteries.

Unless you are the couple in the picture above, who sleep with the lights on, then you may not use the actual clock at night. I have tried a bunch of alarm apps and, while they work to wake me with mellow music, the glow of the screen is too bright. Even with a blank black screen image and the backlight turned all the way down, enough photons escape the screen to illuminate the room slightly. This isn’t a criticism of the iLuv app, just a note on iPhones in general (and on my hypersensitivity to the light creeping into my hermetically sealed bedroom).

We do like this trend of marrying hardware and software, though, especially as the apps (including this one) often come free, a kind of software promo. The speaker will cost you actual dollars, though: Ninety of them.

iMM190 [iLuv. Thanks, Jennifer!]

iLuv App Clock [iTunes]