They may not sound it, but bedside alarm clocks can play an integral part in your day.

Waking up to soothing music rather than a buzzer or, worse, white noise is the modern day equivalent of getting out the wrong side of bed.

And simple things like having the snooze button in a blind, yet whackable position can mean the difference between a stress-free and stress-filled start to the day.

The Roberts Gemini 29 seems to have been designed with all this in mind. There's a wide range of dimmer levels for the backlight, which means no annoying illumination when trying to get to sleep, a handy nap timer for 40 (or 20) winks during the day, an automatic clock setting and, of course, a big snooze button on the top that also doubles up as a sleep function.

It's a digital radio, which means crystal clear reception. Accompanying DAB information scrolls across the big screen, signifying the name the tune that just awoke you from your slumber. It's also got an FM tuner for accessing stations that haven't yet joined the digital revolution, 10 station presets and two alarms. Decent sound quality emits from the single top-mounted speaker. So far, so good.

However, it does have a couple of quirks that spoilt more than one of our mornings. Firstly, there's no way of controlling the volume level of the radio alarm, which, we think, is louder than necessary. Cue a rude awakening after eight hours of silence and a subsequent grumpy face.

Roberts told us that a new 'humane waking' feature has been incorporated into the Gemini 29 that starts the alarm quietly and gradually builds up in volume level, however this was certainly not the case on our review model.

Also, the radio won't let you cycle through the various information modes when in alarm mode. For example, if you've got scrolling track and artist information, you can't hit the info button to reveal the time; quite a pertinent feature if you've got a job to get to.

It's also very big, measuring almost 20cm wide, 17cm deep and just over 8cm high. It weighs 1Kg.

It does, however, have an auxiliary input socket to connect iPods and other portable music players but it isn't possible to synchronise these with the alarm.

At £100, the Gemini 29 is a lot to ask for, considering it's a glorified DAB radio alarm clock. It does have some interesting features but we wouldn't spend that much money on a device you'd potentially listen to for a half an hour a day.

Vista compatible: N/A

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