The Nokia N9 Alarm Clock (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The Nokia N9 Alarm Clock (2014)

nition.momentstudio.co.nz

164 pointsrahuldottech98 comments

I wondered why my old article was suddenly getting new comments. I guess someone saw my comment yesterday[1].

A few notes:

- This should have a [2014] tag.

- The Nokia N9 was released in 2011. There are indeed some other clocks like this now. A subset of them are explicitly copying the N9.

- To those complaining about the dial interface, you often don't have to turn the dials. Since it snaps to the nearest five minutes when you tap, you can set your alarm in two taps. You do have to spin the dial around to change a.m. to p.m. though. With the slight vibration as you turn, it feels better on a touchscreen than you might think.

- Yes Sailfish has a similar implementation. I used a Jolla Sailfish phone after my N9 until I eventually broke it. Then I used Sailfish on an Xperia X but the phone was just too big. There are no Sailfish phones that I can put in my pocket now; I'm currently using an old iPhone 5C. The vertical scrolly-dial alarm clock interface sucks.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19595938

What about the Xperia X Compact? It’s supported too.

It's not officially supported. That and I just don't want to pay for another new phone. Official support right now is:

- Xperia X, Xperia XA2, Xperia XA2 Plus, Xperia XA2 Ultra.

I have seen that there is some community support for the Xperia X Compact though.

The newest Sony "compact", the XZ2 Compact, is almost as large as the original Xperia X now too.

  Galaxy S10+:        158 x 74 mm
  Xperia X:           143 x 69 mm
  Xperia XZ2 Compact: 135 x 65 mm
  Xperia X Compact:   129 x 65 mm
  iPhone SE:          124 x 59 mm
  Nokia N9:           117 x 61 mm

I think the perfect phone for me would be an N9/iPhone SE size phone with an iPhone X-style borderless screen and Meego or Sailfish OS.

Xperia X Compact is not officially supported, but a member of the community created a patcher that turns the official Xperua X Sailfish OS image into one you can use for X compact:

https://github.com/g7/sailfishx-patcher-f5321

After that all works, including OTA uogrades. A friend of mine flashed such a patched Sailfish OS image on his X compact and AFAIK all works fine for him. :)

Seems like the perfect app to be written in Umajin.

Meego could actually succeed if Nokia continue their support. Instead,they pull their life before it hit the market. And boy, did it do great. N9 to me was like when first iPhone was introduced, such a revolutionary phone.

I always wonder what the alternate reality is if Nokia continued with Meego instead of Windows Phone. I know there are Sailfish OS, but the support needed is huge for a new OS when Android and iOS already dominated the market, and they cant carry them forward.

Even in modern mobile OS, although they improved, the UX is not as intuitive as Nokia N9.

I was a fan of Nokia N9, I used it for a year and I absolutely loved it. It was ahead of its time that's for sure.

BUT, I am not sure whether Meego would have been the better choice over Windows for Nokia. Creating a 3rd ecosystem requires more than having a better OS. If you check out Windows Phone reviews, it was also a very good OS. Windows was more cross-platform than Meego as well. It was ready for phones as well as tablets and wearables. And it is already the most popular OS on desktop. It was backed by the giant Microsoft with enormous resources as well as Nokia's resources. There were a lot of developers who were familiar with Windows development (C# + XAML)

...And despite all these advantages, even Windows couldn't become the 3rd ecosystem and thrown the towel after years. And the problem was not the OS itself, it was the lack of apps. Big names simply didn't bring their apps to a third platform.

So I think Meego would have gone nowhere even if Nokia chose it over Windows. Of course we can't know for sure...

Next, can I have a microwave oven that has just 2 dials? Time & Power

I've recently bought two different cheap ones. They're both like that. Nothing but power and time. Timer is mechanical. I much prefer this UX over more cumbersome and expensive ones.

Amen!

It's difficult to show you the relevant ads when you don't even have a screen.

Are there microwave ovens with ads?

There are gas pumps with ads, operating systems with ads, eReaders with ads... it's only a matter of time.

Ha, comic gold (because there's truth to it)!

Of course you can... The cheap ones are like that.

I remember having one of the digital ones too, and the UX was terrible (took me a few days to understand it). It had like 12 buttons of which you only needed to use 3 or so. It also had a speaker that would beep every time I pressed a button, and it was LOUD, I felt like I was waking up the entire neighbourhood every time I microwaved something in the middle of the night. If I had to choose an adjective to describe the entire affair it would be "stupid".

And that stops beeping after you've opened the door?

To make my life simple, I always buy - at long intervals - a cheap microwave with those two dials.

To make it simpler, I don't touch the power dial, and just open and close the door to turn the microwave on and off. The time dial is just a safety backup.

Works for me.

I had a samsung microwave like this and the ux was really solid on it. It literally had only the two dials on it, and the time dial had nice curve so you could easily set short (<1min) times precisely, and longer times quickly

https://www.thewrightbuy.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1...

I have the same and it's easily the best interface I've ever used on any microwave. I am always baffled by the ones with two dozen buttons. Who on earth uses all those modes? Even more infuriating is when they actually make it harder to enter the time you want by doing something insane like only having a 'one minute' and a 'ten seconds' button that you have to press repeatedly.

If someone could make washing machines, dryers, dishwashers and TV remotes with similarly decluttered interfaces I would be very happy. I even find fridges hard to use! Most of them seem to have a scale (e.g. 1-5) of buttons for the fridge temperature. Who can tell me (without looking in the manual) which end of that scale is 'cold' and which is 'warm'? They never label whether it represents power or temperature.

I've been looking for a microwave like that for years. Unfortunately that model is not available in my country.

That's what I was looking for... even if I can't easily get it here. I'd also be happy with a clean/wipeable glass touch screen implementation of the same (which could have all the other controls the gadget freaks want).

How about one that lets you know the food is done without waking up the house with the sound of a 1970's alarm clock?

I have been thinking of starting a service to "neuter" electronics. Like bring your microwave and the beep gets killed. Lots of devices could use this sort of thing - squeaky/annoying noises removed. Fans replaced with quieter ones. LED brightness reduced. I don't know how to handle the logistics of it though.

I recently nabbed one of these: https://www.breville.com/au/en/products/microwaves/bmo735.ht....

Dials are the entry point and all you ever have to use, but there are some quick entry points for various programs. Also, the door is just a handle instead of a mechanical button that gets gummed up and stops actually working after a while, and the "little bit more" button gimmick is really handy.

A microwave is a weird thing to be enthusiastic about but this thing ticked a lot of my design boxes.

My theory is that if there are sub-par designers in an appliance company, they are assigned to the team which designs microwave ovens.

I think a single "30 second" button would accommodate 90% of my microwaving needs - it has like a dozen special mode buttons, but I almost always hit the 30 second button enough times for whatever I'm making. Maybe a second "50% power" button would get me to 100%.

The microwave at work here has a start button that triples as "Start with 1 minute" and "add another minute". So most things can be accomplished with just that one button without even touching the dial.

Cheap ones usually have only that. I am using one - can't complain.

I always wanted to do an 'online microwave UI generator' where it generates a random typically-overcomplicated microwave-like UI and you have to figure out which buttons to press to microwave a cup of milk for 1 min

I'd say, please do it :-) I'd love to play around with something like that!

I found the alarm clock quite annoying to use. Usually I want to set an exact time. A slider, be it round or linear, is better suited to tuning something while watching for feedback.

That's how faders are used on physical sound mixers as well. You slide it until you hear what you want.

On Meego switching between apps was way way smoother than android though.

What an interestingly different interpretation from my own experience.

I found the ability to have two dials like this made it extremely easy to jump to a quartile of time (say 0-3 hour mark, 0-15 minutes) and then precisely tune in on the exact hour or minute.

I wish more UI was this intuitive and powerful.

The time selector on iOS (haven't used Android in a quick minute) is absolutely dreadful by comparison.

Sailfish OS had the same alarm clock widget since lauch (~2015), which is not surprising given that many ex-Nokia people who worked on the N9 created the Jolla company and started Sailfish OS.

In any case this is how it looks like on my Sony Xperia X running officially supported Sailfish OS 3:

https://imgur.com/a/oNZgORn

To me, the time of day is four digits counting up.

The Android version of this instead makes me choose two points on three concentric circles (am+pm+minutes). It's neither helpful, useful, nor familiar.

If someone wanted you to enter phone numbers this way to mimic rotary dials, they would be laughed out of the room.

The circular thumb rotation is pretty quick for picking, think of an ipod wheel.

I completely agree. I'm not sure if there is a word for this, but I think of it as "design should match the way your brain says it". I.e. may brain says "6:15 AM", and I imagine that in my head exactly how I write it, not some weird combination of circular dials. In fact, when I see those weird combinations of circular dials on the Android clock I always feel like I need to "translate" between my mental vision of seeing "6:15 AM" and rotating an unintuitive dial.

Might be an age thing, but the circular dial is completely intuitive if you've learned how to read an analog clock at a young age.

Unlike the widget described in the article, it doesn't snap in 5 minute increments for the minutes, which makes it a bit more finnicky, but otherwise 6:15 am is just a tap at 6 (south) and 15 (east).

The Android widget is a huge design fail. If you accidentally touch the wrong hour, or get into PM instead of AM, you have no way to correct. It became bearable to use once I forced myself to always swipe the hours and minutes until it read the right value, and to lift the finger then.

It's still not as bad as the Samsung and iOS vertical dial with 60 options, though.

My old Symbian phone (pre touch) allowed to just type the desired alarm time on the keyboard. I could blindly set an alarm. Those were the times...

I just tried it again on Android 9 (Pie), and as you say, it's definitely crappier if you're using AM/PM (my local settings have it on 24 hour time display), since there's an extra tap required for AM/PM and one could miss it and set an alarm for 6 PM instead of 6 AM. This may be more intuitive to someone used to a 12 hour locale.

That being said, in the alarm clock dialog, if you add a new alarm, there's a button that allows the user to type in the time using a keyboard (there's a keyboard icon to the bottom left), the first tap allows you to select the hour (shows both 0-12 and 13-23 if the locale is set to 24 hour clock), another tap will select the minute. If you're on 12 hour clock, you may need to change between AM/PM by tapping it. Tapping either the minute or the hour will allow changing that value.

Other than having the 5 minute snap on tap (as TFA points out, who really wants an alarm at 6:01 or 5:59?), it seems as if it allows all possible interactions, where the user can pick whatever input modality they want.

I have learned how to read an analog clock at young age, since that's all we had - even wristwatches were a luxury. But it's still much easier to set the alarm on a digital clock.

As my sibling commenter wrote, what your brain thinks is how it works may differ to how others' brains think it should be (e.g. older people used to analog clocks).

It would be neat if the system could offer a choice of UIs. On the same topic, one thing I really hate about Android's calendar is if you want to add an appointment e.g. 6 months in the future, you'd have to scroll through 6 months. I figured the fastest way for me to add things is to say "OK Google, add an appointment on (date) at (time)".

You can tap on the title of the widget to get into the month / year selection. It doesn't exactly help discoverability that it looks like a title and not like a button.

I do have to say, this way of the N9 is really efficient and quick. I use it on my Jolla 1 phone, and you dial to the hour, and to the minute. Just two press/swipe actions. Not 20 up-up-up presses.

> And of course, you can turn the phone off at night and it still turns itself on in the morning for the alarm.

I have missed this feature ever since smartphones became popular.

How come this isn't a standard feature of each smartphone by now? Are there any technical limitations?

The top answer here has some info re hardware support: https://together.jolla.com/question/174903/alarm-doesnt-wake...

I also miss it, as I use my phone as my alarm but there's no other reason for me to leave it on at night.

DnD/Quiet Mode has basically supplanted "off".

The cpu needs to be able to support it, mediatek smartphone have it I think.

“Edison, an off switch!”

“She’ll get years for that. Off switches are illegal.”

— Max Headroom, season 1, episode 6: “The Blanks”, 1987

What I find is that most alarm clock apps do not have features like to wake up to radio(FM/streaming), wake up to a preset/randomized playlist or podcasts, gradual increase in alarm volume(android stock app allows a volume ramp up, but its ramping duration is too short).

> wake up to radio(FM/streaming)

It's probably not feasible from an alarm clock app but rather from a radio app: I have found happiness for this use case with radiodroid (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.programmie...)

> It's probably not feasible from an alarm clock app

It can trigger an arbitrary intent.

My wife's Xiaomi phone has some woman speaking Chinese every morning (not sure what she's saying, we don't speak it), which reminds me, need to find a way to turn it off.

She's telling you the time and weather. Depending on the circumstances she will add some tips like "Put on sunscreen", "bring an umbrella" or "put on a mask to protect against pollution". First time I heard the latter one I was like "I'm living in one of these dystopian sci-fi films I love so much...".

edit: To get rid of it, just change the alarm sound. It's nothing special, just one of the options.

This is a supported feature on Google's Clock app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

You can trigger a Google Assistant routine including turn on the lights, report the weather and start playing podcasts.

Does it use the alarms's volume level for playing the podcast or does it use the media volume level?

Strangely it does not seem to support playing media/playlist/radio from google music as alarm.

Even more strangely it all requires to be set up using Google Assistant, I mean is there someway to configure it without using voice commands to the Google Assistant, which is a tedious and cumbersome interface for such a complex functionality.

Since 2012 you can set the built-in iOS alarm clock to wake up to the song of your choice.

From the app: Edit > pick your alarm > Sound > Pick a song > Then select the song you want.

It's not great that it can't just wake you up to a shuffled morning playlist, but it's better than a ringtone.

(I have mine set to one of the train station jingles from a Tokyo Metro CD.)

This is from 2014. The Android alarm clock now has roughly the same design.

Exactly. I read through this thinking "But... Google basically cloned this about three years ago..."

Somehow, but the end user experience is very different.

I own both an N9, which I still use as an alarm clock, and a Pixel.

The N9 alarm clock is incredibly smooth, and intuitive. You never over or underturn clock hands. Whereas I have seen lots of people, particularly my dad, struggling with the Android counterpart.

The N9 was an incredibly well designed product in most respects. I particularly miss the small screen with a curved glass that integrated so well with single-hand gestures (up to minimize app, down to close, left and right to move to next or previous window-card).

Maemo/MeeGo are, in some ways, the BeOS of the mobile world.

I like to imagine an alternate reality where Nokia, Rim, and Palm combined.

Imagine if Microsoft would have embraced Meego instead of killing it, and focused more on business and quality apps. If you see a large wave, you should surf it, not try to make it change direction. But sometimes you have to make the wave, way out in the ocean where it will barely be noticed, but once it hits shallow water everyone else will be caught off guard.

I disagree. The only similarity the Android UX has is trying to use an analogue face.

When setting a new alarm Android prompts for the hours and then prompts the minutes. The flow is really whacko if you make a mistake. Your certainly are not setting both at once, and it isn't easy to edit.

2. The hours are a twenty four hour clock, and I regularly set an alarm for 4am when I mean 4pm.

3. After adding a new alarm it gets lost in the list

I would guess Android gets the daylight saving stuff correct that he mentioned, but did you test it?

I'm still angry that internal politicking at Nokia killed Meego. The N9, in 2011, seriously felt like a phone that had arrived from the future, or another timeline where everything is more elegant than in ours. Nokia simply should not have been able to come up with a phone with such polished user experience. But they did, and then they threw it away and instead bet on a completely wrong horse.

Must be the incentive to innovate.

This.

After using Nokia N9 (and Nokia N950) for 1.5 years and switching back then to iOS, I almost couldn't believe how crappy iOS alarm experience was (and still is!) in contrast to the overall polished UI.

I also enjoyed a lot the swipe based navigation between screens and closing apps by swiping them app – this concept was so much ahead of it's time. Now it's in iOS and Android as well.

Whoever worked on Meego/Harmattan UI – you are geniuses. Just know that your work was very much appreciated even if underrated by mainstream.

I loved my Nokia N9. Everything about the UI felt really good. I would switch back if they refreshed the hardware, app support be damned. Although, now that Android and iOS integrate so many more swipe gestures, it's possible the advantages would be less pronounced.

I know most of the same developers went onto make Sailfish, but I've tried that and the UI doesn't feel nearly as good. :(

> Everything about the UI felt really good.

It wasn't just the software UI, but the hardware felt good and gestures felt natural on the device. It was the first time I used a phone and felt like the hardware and software were made for each other from the start. iOS and Android phones always felt like they were incrementally trying to get there, but never started there.

Everything since has sucked for usability.

The way the screen curved and flowed smoothly into the rounded edges worked particularly well with the swipe-based interface (namely the edge swipes).

> I know most of the same developers went onto make Sailfish, but I've tried that and the UI doesn't feel nearly as good. :(

I still wish the best for Sailfish, but it was such a disappointment when the first device was released. I had preordered it as I loved the N9 so much, but the beauty and functionality of the UI was sadly lost. I used Sailfish for a month maybe, at which point I was convinced that it just won't be going very far without a UI/UX revamp.

Also, what was going on with the tactile feedback on the N9? Pressing the virtual keys felt almost real. I've not touched anything similar since then.

Low latency maybe? High latency is my user interface pet peeve... You can't see it in a designer's portfolio, you can't see it directly in the code, few reviews measure it, but it makes everything feel unsatisfying to use.

This is still one of my pet peeves on non-N9 devices. There's a device that got it right, and it's still not copied over.

N9 truly was a beauty when it came out. Of course it's a bit underwhelming now with the dated hardware, but I the UI (and tactile feedback..) still holds up after all these years.

I think its got a linear actuator inside instead of a vibrator motor, you can feel so much of the UI.

It's crazy how similar this was to the new Clock app introduced in iOS 10 (2016).

I actually see various aspects of this with rather poor design. The most glaring thing is the minute hand on the clock, which is so thin as to be nearly invisible. This is made worse by it being white on a light-grey background, and even worse by the fact that its shape doesn't match with the hour hand, which has rounded ends. This is a very hard clock to read. The three hands also don't give the impression that they rotate around a common center point. The day-of-week indicator is also tiny, and hard to read, again because of the mixed greys. 50% grey displayed on a background of around 30% grey isn't elegant; it's just hard to read. The indicator for which day(s) of the week the alarm is set is even worse; nearly invisible.

So like most Android ones these days? I don't find any of these features special. The only noteworthy difference is that the clock is not shown on my current alarms screen and I'm happy to be able to have the extra screen real estate as I have dozens if not hundreds of alarms so I don't have to set it every day again but can just scroll down to the right time and flip a few switches.

For what it's worth I had an n9 and I did not particularly like the alarm clock design. Most of the UI felt somehow wrong to me.

The Android (v9) alarm clock is somewhat like this, Hour and Minute are selected with two nested rotary dials.

This makes me think of the "bed time" iOS clock which is confusing me every time I try to use it.

Manipulating dials on displays is not good design, whether it's with a mouse or on a touchscreen.

How so? The various “circle” alarms on the App Store all have very high ratings and millions of downloads. So it works great for countless people.

I have found a faster way to set both hour and minutes for an alarm than two short circular motions.

Do you have a better design?

They aren't necessarily good design, but affordances are often useful in Human-Computer Interaction.

I can see how it's flawed with a mouse, but why is it bad design on a touchscreen? I haven't seen a better time picker.

I think the comment is getting at the fact that a knob/dial actually has a physical affordance (being grabbed and twisted), which is absent on a smooth glass surface. Hence, aiming to create interactive dials on a touchscreen is an inherently challenging endeavor.

The N9 would vibrate slightly as you turned the dial which helped make it feel tactile.

I suppose the main solution in N9 was to make the dial big enough (not unlike a rotary telephone dial) as opposed to a small knob that you would wish to grab and twist.

Maybe it depends on the input device quality and the task at hand, like for scrolling a huge file I will use dragging with the mouse then the left button or the wheel. Ideally your code is designed in such a way you can have an alternative input method for the clock like just typing in the vules and maybe up/down arrow spinners

While this certainly true in some cases, I don't think this is one of them. They can be large enough to easily use, only 2 values are entered and are familiar for that purpose. The commonly seen alternatives are worse.

Ha you should see audio software, VST's etc.

I'm still wondering why when setting an alarm clock on locked screen iPhone by swiping up and opening the app from Control Center there is a lock icon instead of current time.

Sorry to kindof hijack - I was just about to "Ask HN" but failed - my post would show as regular submission rather than Ask. So I'm posting my question here instead.

Modern Android devices are becoming useless for me, as they won't connect to my car hi-fi nor Linux (neither as mass storage nor MTP device - what a clusterfuck). All I really need is a browser, email client, local storage, MP3 (no streaming), and maybe navigation. Preferably not a large phablet. A good touch display is a plus. Doesn't have to be cheap. Does anybody know of a decent device doing the above, and nothing else?

Hmm, possibly the WiPhone could be of interest: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2103809433/wiphone-a-ph...

It doesn't do everything you need, but it certainly has the potential to if you are willing to put the time in.

this is where android is ultra lame.. the amount of papercuts for the mundane tasks..

I’ve used something like this on recent cheap Androids and it’s a bad idea.

I had to help the person setting it up and it took a while to understand it myself.

You have to consider that right before falling asleep a person is not at their top cognitive capacity. And waking up on time can be really freaking important.

So don’t get smart with alarm clocks.

was searching for an alarm clock for school age kids:

1. no cellphone based alarm, they will abuse it if cellphone is in bedroom sometimes.

2. no $15 dollar alarm clock from Walmart, which you have one setting for Mon-Fri, another one for Sat-Sun, but you have to manually switch them on Friday/Sunday night otherwise you will be waked up at a wrong time.

Is there a smart alarm clock, not smart as an Android phone, but smarter than the legacy models? Our calendar/alarm varies more these days and I need find an alarm in the middle of legacy and cellphone.

no alexa or any of those cloud thingy, need use it when power is off or there is no internet

If I was going to downvote or flag your comments it would be because your question seems related to the post in the the most tangental way possible then you start making accusations about someones mental health that you have zero knowledge about because you got down-voted.

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