App I Love : UNIQLO Wake Up

I will start this by saying that I am not a morning person. There. BUT I do want to be a morning person because of some idea I read from somewhere that successful people wake up at 5 am, which I'm more likely to believe means that successful people have the habit of waking up at 5 am rather than the other way around, which is that waking up at 5 am makes you successful.

Anyway, the point is that I want to wake up around six or seven-ish, but currently that's an impossibly difficult feat given that I sleep around 2 am. But as they, sow an act and you reap a habit, so all I need is to take that step, which is why i've been setting up the alarm everyday.

The problem is so far, none of them have lived up to the task. Either I don't wake up at all or I get up to this shrill, irritating noise that just leaves me wanting to hurl objects at the damned source. Not a good way to start the morning i'm telling you.

Then came this video on my Tumblr dash about an app by UNIQLO called Wake Up and I was like, "sugar coated voice singing the time, day, and weather in the morning to some none shrilly actual music? I am downloading this!", and what do you know we have here a winner!



Truth be told, I was a bit skeptical at first if it would be successful at doing what so many before it had failed to do, but there I was on the first morning waking up at 7 am and actually feeling like my day was going to be full of sunshine and butterflies. Ok.. i'm going way overboard there, but it did actually make me want to listen to the music for a few minutes, which by the  time I got tired of it, I was fully awake already to even think of going back to sleep. Just make sure you have the volume on because it won't stop playing the music, which I found out one morning could drain your batteries faster than you know.

Candy colored screens greet you everytime UNIQLO's alarm app wakes you up

If you ask me, I have no idea why a clothing company such as UNIQLO would dip their toes on something like this social alarm app (yep you read it, social, but more or on that later), but I guess brand promotion is everything nowadays, right?

The app is available for both iOS and Android devices and features music created by Keigo Oyamada who was a Grammy nominee and Yoko Kanno, a famous anime composer who has worked on Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in a Shell  among others. Pretty impressive huh?

Now for the social part of the app, which is one feature I hardly use except to be slightly awed from time to time at having in my hands a visual on when people are waking up around the world. That is cool, but personally i've never really shared my own waking up time through the app because it's in the same thread as the over-sharing / frictionless sharing i'm beginning to resent on Facebook. But, your call.

For simply doing what an alarm app is supposed to do, Wake Up has become one app i'm loving at the moment.  So if you're a sleepyhead with an alarm problem, don't worry. UNIQLO wants to wake you up.