I was very excited to try out my Oboo Smart Clock. I really wanted to demonstrate some of the features to my wife who wondered why I would back a clock on Kickstarter. Unfortunately, the out-of-the-box experience was not very good. The instructions included were minimal, which would have been fine if everything had functioned correctly. They have a browser based app (not a downloadable mobile app as the instructions imply). The app is not well designed and because the scroll boxes don't scroll - you have to guess what acceptable input is based on the ones that you can see. And once you have done the basic setup - if you try to use the reconfigure option to fix a setting, it appears to cause the WiFi to disconnect (or maybe it just suppresses the icon). Initially I had a problem with the battery indicator not working and I also could not change the displayed units from Metric to English. I managed to find an instruction manual using Google and did a firmware update. That fixed the problem with changing the units and it also added a calendar card (it initially had a timer card, a music card and a weather card). There is no traffic card yet. I assume that will be in an update.
Timer Card
Music Card
Calendar Card
Weather Card
If the features that are currently available would work reliably I'd be pretty satisfied, but it appears that the firmware is still extremely buggy. The gesture sensor and the touch buttons don't work consistently and after I had left it on for a few hours, the cards stopped functioning. I've been reading through the comments on the Kickstarter page and it appears that these are all problems that others have encountered. Some of them were supposedly fixed by previous software updates.
It appears that the Onion team underestimated the amount of effort required for this project and doesn't have the resources to complete it in a reasonable time frame. The User Manual that I did find is poorly written.
I do hope that they can manage to make this clock work the way that they had intended and that these are all firmware and not hardware issues. What I would really like to see is for them to make the firmware Open Source. That way, the community could help them make this a better product or at least get all the features working. I haven't seen any indication as to when the Internet Radio and Home Automation Integration might show up.
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