Lumie Bodyclock LUXE 700 Review

Verdict

Pros

• Effective wake alarm
• Decent sound quality
• Lots of built-in sound effects and white noise tracks
• Blue light filtered lamp

Cons

• Fiddly controls
• Expensive

What is the Lumie Bodyclock LUXE 700?

For some people, waking up in the morning is generally not a pleasurable experience. I am one of those people –  I’m as far removed from a ‘morning person’ as you can possibly imagine. More often than not I greet the new day with a grimace rather than a smile.

The idea behind the Bodyclock LUXE 700 is to wake you more seamlessly from your sleep in the morning. It uses a bedside light that emulates the rising sun, gradually telling your body to reduce the production of the sleep hormone melatonin. That way, you’re eased out of sleep rather than snatched from your slumber. At night, it’s designed to help you drift off to sleep by replicating a fading sunset, with optional white noise or calming sound effects to help you nod off.

Throw in some extras like a Bluetooth speaker and USB port for charging your devices and you have a useful multi-function bedside companion, albeit one that’s a little expensive and fiddly to use if you need to regularly change your wake-up time.

Lumie Bodyclock LUXE 700 – Design

The LUXE 700 is reasonably wide at 200 x 230 x 130mm but doesn’t have much depth. Still, you’ll need a reasonable amount of space on your bedside table.

I’m not sure if it was intentional, but the symmetrical orb-shaped design of the Bodyclock LUXE 700 has a distinct face to its front. The two dials and row of five white buttons along the button definitely create a Cheshire Cat-like facade that you can’t unsee.

Still, the black and white combination is attractive enough and it certainly didn’t stand out on my bedside table in a garish manner. The top is dominated by the glass lamp cover, which houses six high-power LEDs. There’s a backlit, dimmable LCD display on the front that displays the time nice and clearly.

Look to the back and you’ll find a USB port that can either be used to charge your device or can be used to access music from a USB flash drive. Next to this are an 3.5 aux port and a headphone jack for private listening.

Lumie Bodyclock LUXE 700 – Setup and use

Setting up the Bodyclock LUXE 700 is a little fiddly for my liking. There are four buttons, one for toggling the alarm on or off, another for turning on the sunset mode, the third for toggling the audio source and the final button for accessing the settings.

Once in the settings you need to use the two dials for navigating the menu tabs and making selections. To select an item you need to press the dials in, as they’re in fact also buttons. This is all well and good but it’s very easy to accidentally rotate the dial when trying to instead press it, moving you to the wrong menu item.

You have the option of setting either a Daily – where the alarm will go off at the same time each day – or Weekly alarm. Setting an alarm with the latter requires you to set it for each day of the week. As my alarm can change day-by-day depending on where I need to be the following day, changing the alarm time is a little laborious the night before.

It’ll be fine if you have a regular alarm pattern – and I’d say also better for your sleep health – but you might find this annoying if you need to constantly change your alarm.

In the settings you can also define the actions for the sunset and sunrise actions, such as the duration for the light, what music or sound effects you want to be played and the brightness of the LCD display. I liked the sound of rainfall during the sunset action but there are plenty of other options or you can use your own music with a sleep timer.

Ultimately, the controls do what they need to, but there’s a lot of memorisation of what things do and it’s a tad more complicated than I would have liked. Still, once you’ve got things finally set up as you like, you can largely leave things be.

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I actually did find the sunset actions helped me to fall asleep at night. I set the light to gradually dim over 15 minutes. Similarly, I also found myself waking up feeling less groggy in the morning thanks to the sunrise light. I eventually turned off the actual alarm sound as I found the light was enough to wake me up, although that could have also partially been a bit of bodyclock training as well.

Granted, I didn’t wake up feeling like the world was sunshine and rainbows like a movie cliché, but it was certainly better than the infuriating buzzing of a conventional alarm.

The Bodyclock LUXE 700 can also be used as a standard bedside lamp and you can adjust the brightness using the left dial. Clicking the dial in will also toggle a low blue light mode, which is useful at night. Supposedly, too much blue spectrum light at night affects your circadian rhythm, thereby making it more difficult to fall asleep.

Lumie Bodyclock LUXE 700 – Bluetooth and sound quality

Pairing a music device to the Bodyclock is easy enough, or you can connect over a wired 3.5mm connection or USB as mentioned. The USB method will require using the Bodyclock’s dials to navigate your music folders, though, which is far more fiddly than just using your smartphone.

Sound quality is perfectly acceptable. It’s not going stack up against something like the Sonos Play:1 I also have on my bedside, it sounds a little thin in the low-end, but it does a perfectly serviceable job as a general bedside speaker. I also really liked using it to listen to podcasts to help send me to the land of nod.

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Should I buy the Lumie Bodyclock LUXE 700?

If, like me, you both find it difficult to fall asleep and then even more difficult to wake up, the Bodyclock LUXE 700 could be for you. Its defining features work really well and provided you don’t have a constantly fluctuating alarm time, you won’t have to constantly deal with its fiddly controls. It is still a little pricey for my liking. But if you can’t put a value on a good night’s sleep, you may well consider it justifies its hefty price tag.

Verdict

The Lumie Bodyclock LUXE 700 is a little fiddly to use but it can help deliver a good night’s kip

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