Ever since Scott Forstall announced the music API at the March iPhone 3.0 SDK event, I’ve been waiting for Embraceware to get the wraps on Awaken for iPhone [iTunes]. As a Mac client, Awaken is a brilliant and beautiful alarm clock, allowing you to set multiple alarms, playlists, and make it all fade in and out at the right time. One of the best ones on the Mac platform.

When moving to the iPhone version, we all know it’s going to have its limitations. The biggest one is the alarm cannot run if the application is quit. Awaken for iPhone tries to carry along as much as it can from the desktop experience.

Screenshots don’t do justice to how gorgeous this looks at night, especially with brightness toned down

When you start Awaken, you’re greeted with a beautiful clock. The clock looks like one you would find on a nightstand—rotating the device puts the clock in full screen. There’s three styles to it: blue, pink, and a flip clock. The next tab is for ‘Alarms’, the meat of the application. You can add multiple alarms, each having its own days for repeating. You can set the volume, day, and best of all, music from your iPod. The selector pops up and you just tap along songs as you would while creating an on-the-go playlist. There’s also a ‘Sounds’ tab, if you’re not interested in waking up to music; a good selection of chimes, bells, and beeps. The Sleep timer is similar to the Alarm, although there’s only one possible sleep timer, and no possibility of using sounds.

Moving on to the settings, you can prevent the device from sleeping, change snooze timings, and enable the ‘fade in brightness’ and ‘fade in volume’ for your Alarms (and the opposite for Sleep timers). So far so good, Awaken for iPhone is almost like the Mac version.

I tested the Alarm on two occasions, one with the iPhone docked in the power, and another night on its own. Both times the alarm kicked in flawlessly, although in its locked state, there’s no fade in brightness. The first gen iPhone of course has a terribly soft speaker[1. But loud enough with the Griffin AirCurve], so it’s fairly useless for ‘serious waking up’, but with an iPhone 3G or 3GS things should be much louder.

Features aside, Awaken for iPhone is a looker. Jerry Brace has painted the Awaken app with beautiful pixels—almost Tapbots like. He has really taken his time in perfecting the user interface, and it shows. Everything is fluid, easy to use, and is never a tap too much. And when the music plays, the artwork looks even better with some custom shadows, perfect for that ‘waking up’ mood. Save for the rather average looking looking icon, and the empty splash screen, I couldn’t find one thing to complain about.

One brilliant addition to Awaken, which makes total sense, is the inclusion of a flashlight. Given that the app is to be left open through the night, having to fish out a separate app for a flashlight would be tedious. With just a flick of the device the Flashlight ‘snaps’ into action, and goes away just as easily.

One might argue for seamless syncing between the iPhone and desktop version, but as of right not, it’s not needed. That said, you never know what Jerry Brace has planned for us in Awaken 5.0 which is just round the corner. For a 1.0 release the Awaken for iPhone is surprisingly feature complete, stable, and useful. At $1.99 at the App Store, it’s the perfect way to wake up to your music.

Giving away some codes

If you’re up for it, we’re giving away 3 codes, all thanks to Embraceware. All you have to do is let us know which is the song you’d like to wake up to, or send out a tweet with a link back to this post. Trust me, it’s gonna be worth it. Standard giveaway rules apply. Update: Contest is done with; winners announced in comments.