Nintendo shocks fans with Alarmo

Nintendo has some surprise hardware news for us this week. No, it is not the Switch 2. Instead, Nintendo has focused its efforts on something far stranger for a videogames company – an alarm clock.

Nintendo has announced the Alarmo, a small alarm clock for your bedside table, with fonts and flashing images from historic Nintendo games like Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda and even Splatoon. Naturally, the alarm also borrows music and sound effects from Nintendo games.

If you love Nintendo so much that you want to be awoken by the sound of Splatoon guns firing, then the Alarmo appears to be the product for you. Interestingly, the clock also connects to WiFi, so the alarm clock should get new alarm tones and clock faces over time as part of a series of free OTA updates.

With that said, as Nintendo isn’t well known for IoT devices, I would like to see some security analysis, as cheap smarthome devices have the unfortunate side effect of also being a potential backdoor to your network.

The Alarmo will be available in early 2025, with the first wave being made available to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers. This isn’t Nintendo’s first rodeo with unexpected products. Earlier in the Switch’s life cycle, the company had fans out in droves to buy boxes of cardboard to create peripherals for Switch games. One of these kits turned the Switch into a wearable VR headset.

KitGuru Says: In the age of smartphones, having a dedicated alarm clock seems a tad outdated. Still, there will no doubt be hardcore Nintendo fans looking to pick one of these up. 

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