By Prince Osuagwu

Man is always on the move. In this part of the world, the culture behoves  him to cater for a lot of other people other than his immediate family. The environment, inadequate infrastructure and lack of maintenance culture also puts pressure on him.

In most cases, he misses appointments that would have fetched fortunes. That is why the derogatory cliché ‘African time’ has almost become a known culture for this continent.

To shake off this bad toga of meeting appointments behind schedule, the African man must employ alternative means. A lot of people depend on their partners or family members to wake them up early in the morning to meet up with a meeting or other assignments. Others set alarms on their wall clocks, which most often would be hanging at the sitting room far from their bedrooms.

In most cases these methods fail. It’s either the family members themselves over sleeps or the wall clock lets off the alarm without the user getting to hear it.

However, the irony of it all is that in almost every model of the mobile phone, which has become everybody’s closest friend and companion, there is an Alarm application conspicuously displayed and it is obvious that the aptly named Alarm Clock app offers a bit more versatility than the standard Clock app

It could be argued that over 80 percent of mobile phone users sleep with their phones on and at their bedside. In spite of the importance of this app and a lot of transformation it can bring to people’s social and business lives, it is grossly under-utilized.

The question becomes why employ means that are not full proof when the Alarm app can do the magic?
Perhaps the most common answer could be that majority of people may not know how to activate the Alarm app on their mobile phones. Mobile phones are becoming more complex and knowing how to set an alarm isn’t always straight forward.

How to set up an alarm on mobile phone
If you are using smart phones, for instance, the iPhone or Samsung GalaxyS2 this guide intends to show you how to set an alarm. Incidentally, the method is always similar to almost every phone.

The first step is to find the “Clock” application on the phone. In most phones the alarm Clock app is standing alone. But in most smart phones, you should be able to find this application in the “App drawer” or ‘App store’ by clicking on  “Application” at the bottom of the screen.

The next action would be to click on “Clock” and then select the “Alarm” option. After this action, an option “Create alarm”, would show on. The user would need to click here and then enter all the information he needs to use.

The most likely information to enter are the time you want the alarm to go off, the day (or days) that you want the alarm setting for.

After setting the time and day of the alarm, the user can select the type of alert (noise, vibration or both) as well as a tone and snooze settings. When you are happy with everything you need to select “Save” from the bottom left of the screen and relax safe in the knowledge that the alarm will go off at the time you’ve set the alarm for.