The Sleeptracker watch makes a lot of lofty promises. It claims that by wearing it, you'll wake up refreshed and ready to take on the day every single morning. By tracking your sleeping patterns, it purports to be able to pinpoint exactly when you're closest to waking, then gently prods you out of sleep. Because a normal alarm clock will wake you up sometimes from a deep sleep and sometimes from a light sleep, it can feel pretty random as to why you just can't get your motor started in the morning. By always waking you during a light sleep, you can, in theory, eliminate those painful mornings where you feel like you barely slept.

When I first heard about the Sleeptracker I was excited, to say the least. The prospect of always waking up refreshed seemed life-changing to me. We've all experienced the phenomenon of jumping out of bed with the alarm and how much that affects your day; if you could somehow make that happen every morning, it would be a miracle. But can a simple watch do that for you? Well… sort of.

The first thing I noticed when I took the Sleeptracker out of the box is how cheap it feels. While the watch is certainly no Cartier, it's not exactly inexpensive, so one would expect relatively solid construction. Instead you get the rubber wristband and wide LED face that reminds you of something you'd get out of a happy meal. Honestly, they don't make watches that feel any cheaper than this. It doesn't exactly instill confidence in its body-clock-sensing properties.

Setting the watch requires the instruction book. The buttons, even though they're labeled, aren't that clear, and the cryptic display doesn't help much. You first set a "window" for when you want to wake up. For example, if I set the alarm for 8 a.m. with a 20-minute window, the watch will wake me up when I am sleeping the lightest between 7:40 and 8:00. You can set the window to be as long as a half hour or as short as 5 minutes, with the longer window obviously giving you a better chance at being awakened gently. You then set what time you think you'll fall asleep. You do this to let the watch know when to start recording your sleep cycles — the 4-5 periods each night where you move from a lighter to a deeper sleep. The Sleeptracker records these cycles to determine when to wake you up, and allows you to review the data in the morning to see when you were sleeping the soundest. Confusingly, you need to set the "to bed" time as a half hour after you anticipate falling asleep. Why you don't just put in your bedtime and let the watch figure out to start tracking a half-hour after you go to bed is beyond me, but that's what you have to do.

So the million-dollar question is obviously whether or not this actually works. I can say that yes, I think it does. One morning I opened my eyes just a sliver to look at my clock, and by the time my brain was registering that it was 10 minutes before I was supposed to get up, my watch was beeping. Other mornings it woke me up when I was half-awake, kicking me out of a drowsy dream. Of course, it's not a miracle worker. One night I went out drinking and slept less than seven hours (in the name of this review, of course), and it just woke me up at the normal time, feeling as crappy as ever.

There were two main problems I had with the watch. First of all, have you ever slept with a watch on? It's pretty uncomfortable. I found myself bothered by it every single night, and I never really got used to it. Second, I found myself just going back to sleep when the watch went off. I began to think of it like a fancy snooze button: it would wake me up 10 minutes before my normal alarm was set, and then I would just fall back asleep until that went off. While yes, it does wake you up when you're sleeping lightly, you're still just waking up. It doesn't fill you with a boost of energy and an excitement to take on the day. After the novelty of it wore off, I never got out of bed when it woke me up. You need to be disciplined to actually take advantage of the Sleeptracker, and apparently I'm not.

While the Sleeptracker does seem to live up to its promises of waking you up when you're sleeping the lightest, it didn't quite change my life as much as I hoped. I think this watch could work wonders for the right kind of person. If you never hit your snooze button and don't mind having a cheap rubber watch on all night, it's perfect for you. If you like to hang onto every precious minute of sweet, sweet pillow time, however, it will probably just act as a preemptive snooze button for you. — Adam Frucci