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It seems like Nintendo just revealed its mysterious device that recently crossed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — and it’s not the Switch 2. On Wednesday, Nintendo announced, of all things, the “Alarmo” alarm clock. But in classic Nintendo fashion, the clock has some playful tricks.
The clock responds to your movements, which you can use to snooze your alarm with motion. Its faces feature Nintendo characters from franchises like Super Mario and Zelda, and you can set the alarm to wake you up with music from those franchises. The Alarmo can also track how much you move in your sleep.
The Alarmo — officially, the “Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo” — is available to purchase in “early access” for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers and at the Nintendo NY store. We’ve actually already picked one up, and we’ve published some initial impressions and a bunch of photos.
Here’s all of our coverage of Nintendo’s Alarmo clock.
A closer look at Nintendo’s adorable Alarmo clock
Look, I’m a sucker for instant gratification. It’s often one of my favorite things about living in New York City. This morning, Nintendo announced its $99 Alarmo clock, and when the company’s store in Rockefeller Center opened a couple hours later, I walked in and picked one up. Did I feel a little iffy about paying $108.91 after tax for a plastic alarm clock? You bet. But fortunately, in my field, this counts as a work expense. (Technically, this product is called Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo — but no one is ever going to refer to it that way. It’s Alarmo.)
The Verge’s senior entertainment editor Andrew Webster will have a full review of Alarmo coming up, but I wanted to check it out for myself. Mostly, I was curious about the audio quality. If the speaker in this relatively tiny clock sounds tinny or shrill, that would ruin the whole concept for me.
Now anyone can buy an Alarmo.
Nintendo’s motion-sensing (and Doom-playing, with some unsanctioned modification) alarm clock is now available for anyone in the US to buy from its online store “while supplies last,” the company announced yesterday.
Nintendo’s Alarmo will be available for everyone starting in March
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
Another day, another announcement from Nintendo that isn’t the next Switch. Today the company revealed that its alarm clock, Alarmo, will be available at select retailers starting this March. The announcement includes the US, UK, and Europe.
The $99 alarm clock launched late last year, but is currently only available to those with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. Today’s news opens that up to the larger public. The motion-controlled device lets users turn it off simply by getting up, though in my experience, that functionality wasn’t much use if you share a bed. It also includes a number of sounds and themes based on Nintendo properties, including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe through a recent update.
Can Nintendo’s Alarmo run Doom? You bet it can
What do John Deere tractors, Ikea smart bulbs, Lego bricks, and the MacBook Pro Touch Bar have in common? They can all run Doom, and naturally, so can Nintendo’s adorable Alarmo alarm clock. It was only a matter of time before someone pulled that off, but what I didn’t expect was that when it happened, it would be playable.
That’s exactly what hacker GaryOberNicht, who recently figured out how to run custom firmware on the Alarmo, did in a video posted to Mastodon and their X account yesterday. In it, they play by turning or pressing the mushroom-shaped blob on top of the Alarmo to move and pressing the other buttons to shoot or open doors. Here, have a look:
Sound the Alarmo!
Nintendo’s buzzy new alarm clock has been jailbroken by a hacker named Gary who figured out the device’s boot sequence and found a way to exploit and run code through USB. It opens up the possibility for some interesting hacks, but to start we have cat pictures and plasma effects.
I totally forgot we wrote about Nintendo’s sleep tracking alarm clock 10 years ago.
Nintendo’s original alarm clock prototypes were a lot less playful
Image: Nintendo
Nintendo just announced its new Alarmo clock with a motion sensor, and even though we’re still soaking in the $100 device, the company also shared a look at some interesting early prototypes that reveal how the project changed during its development.
While the Alarmo is round and an eye-catching red, one “early” prototype Nintendo showed in an “Ask the Developer” interview had a more boxy shape and came in gray. This prototype did have an interesting feature in its dot matrix LED display (similar to the now-discontinued Echo Dot with Clock), but Nintendo ultimately went in a different direction because “we felt that this display system wouldn’t be able to communicate the instructions sufficiently,” says Nintendo’s Yosuke Tamori, who oversaw the development of the Alarmo. “It was especially difficult to explain the product’s new features, such as the motion sensor,” he says.
Nintendo is making an alarm clock so you can wake up to Zelda and Super Mario sounds
It’s not a successor to the Switch, but Nintendo does have a new piece of hardware to announce: a motion-controlled alarm clock. The device is called Alarmo, and it “responds to your movements,” which means you can snooze it with a gesture or stop it by actually getting out of bed. It costs $99.99 and will be available in early 2025, though Nintendo says Switch Online subscribers can purchase it early right now.
It appears this is the mystery Nintendo gadget that hit the Federal Communications Commission last month, which revealed that the device features a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi radio and the 24GHz mmWave sensor it uses to detect movement.
What’s this new mystery Nintendo device?
Image: The Verge
Nintendo has submitted a mysterious new wireless device to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this weekend, and it isn’t the Switch 2 console we’re expecting to be revealed before next April. The CLO-001 model number doesn’t reveal what it actually is, but it appears to be an entirely new product line given the “001” codes used on devices like the original Switch (HAC-001) and DS (NTR-001) consoles.
It’s tagged only as a “wireless device,” not a “wireless game console” or any kind of controller like a Joy-Con. A basic diagram within the documents shows an outline of where the FCC label will be “displayed in a depression area on the bottom” of something with a squarish footprint and rounded-off corners.
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