New Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock app for Android wakes you up gently and in style

When you sleep, you pass through different phases, ranging from deep sleep to light sleep, with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep the dream phase. The exact time when your alarm goes off is the most important aspect of how rested you will feel when you wake up, apart from partying all night, and then having someone ring at your door at 8am.

The new Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock app for Android carries over the wonderful tradition of its iOS counterpart app, and detect the different moves you make in the bed, using the accelerometer. Thus the phone determines which sleep phase you are in, while just lying on the bed next to you, and chooses the precise moment to lull you out of sleep, starting 30 minutes before you've set the alarm to go off.

Not only that, but the app offers a variety of proven alarm melodies, or you can use your own music as a wake up sound. For the $2.15 price you also get sleep stats, and even graphs. You can also shrink or expand the timeframe during which the phone has to determine your lightest sleep phase to wake you up, and even add sleep notes, in order to judge whether those glasses of wine you had with dinner affected your sleep patterns.