Free alarm clocks for smartphones are two a penny on the app store, so one really needs to stand out if it’s to get our attention. Especially since we’re such huge fans of Timely. Well we’ve found one, and it’s not bad at all in a lot of ways, since it offers some very cool features that Timely doesn’t at the moment.

Alarmr offers the same kind of good looking interface as Timely, but with some rather nice extra touches. For one thing, you can select your own choice of music as your alarm tone, so you can wake up with a fave track, instead of using one of the default range of sounds (which are pretty cool anyway). For another thing, you get to choose whether you want to be woken with your choice of news reports from a news feed you set, as well as weather for your location. That’s rather cool.

You can also set up a random challenge to stop the alarm, to make sure you don’t just turn over and go back to sleep. The challenges range from shaking the phone a set amount of times, doing a maths puzzle and stuff like that. It’s a great way to ensure your brain is brought up to speed so you can’t drift off again. And we love the fact that Alarmr syncs with your calendar, so you can get a single page view of the weather in your area, the news you’re interested in, and your day’s calendar events instantly on waking. A perfect data snapshot.

You can set multiple alarms obviously, each with it’s own alarm sound, which is another nice customization touch (softer, more gentle alarms on the weekend maybe?) and there’s a world clock function for multiple time zones as well as a sleep timer, which you can set to play music to you for a set amount of time as you drift off at night.

Our only real problem with the app is the interface is nowhere near as good as Timely. With Timely you can set up multiple alarms for different days of the week, and toggle them on and off as you need, and you can do it all in a flash. You also have a stopwatch and time just a quick swipe away from your finger, which is great for boiled eggs and stuff. We also much prefer the way Timely sets up alarms, and even though you don’t get the flexibility of alarm sounds, the fact that Timely gives you ‘smart’ alarms, which only operate when you’re ready for them, really is a brilliant feature.Timely also synchs across devices, so your alarms move with you when you travel, which is awesome.

So which one do we prefer? Well it has to be Timely, although we’d love it if future versions of Timely had the extra customization features of this app. But that said, if you need this kind of stuff more than a fast efficient interface, then Alarmr is a pretty good app to use, especially for those heavy sleepers who may need more of a challenge to get them up and running in the morning. Available for both iOS and Android.