Horizn vs. JALL Wake Up Light
Straight talk up front: Horizn is pre-launch. You can't buy one yet, and the JALL Wake Up Light is a shipping product you can. This page compares what we're building (and wake up to daily) against its vendor-documented facts, sources named. Where it wins, we say so.
I have real respect for this little clock. In an independent light-meter test it measured 545 lux at one foot, genuinely bright for a device this cheap. It demands no app or account, and it costs about as much as a takeout dinner. If you’re skeptical that light can wake you at all, the JALL is the cheapest honest way to find out, and if it converts you, you’ll know exactly what you want more of.
What $35 doesn’t buy is the dawn itself: a ramp shaped to human perception, a pre-dawn phase, a color trajectory, and light that fills a wall instead of a corner. That’s the part Horizn is built around, along with the JALL’s best trait, which is needing nothing from anybody: no app, no account, no subscription, ever.
The five criteria, side by side
| Criterion | Horizn | JALL |
|---|---|---|
| Brightness at your pillow | Room-scale light from a full LED strip along the wall, not a bedside puck. Honesty note: we haven't bench-measured lux yet. Real measured numbers will be published here when we have them, distance stated. | The vendor publishes no lux figure, but an independent light-meter test measured 545 lux at one foot and 275 lux at 18 inches: genuinely bright for the price. OptimizeYourBiology 15-clock light-meter test |
| Quality of the sunrise ramp | A gamma-corrected biological brightness curve with four tunable points, a separate pre-dawn glow phase, and a color-trajectory dawn (violet → magenta → ember → amber) rendered at 60 fps on a dedicated real-time core. Because the light is hundreds of individually controlled LEDs, the colors exist across space at once. The blush spreads along the wall like a sky, something a single-emitter lamp cannot do by construction. | Brightness ramps 10% to 100% before the alarm; duration options vary by hardware revision (the manual documents 10/20/30 minutes; reviewers report 10–60 on current units). JALL manual; Tom's Guide |
| App, account, subscription | None, ever. Control is a local web page on your own network: no app store, no account, no cloud, no subscription. The alarm keeps its schedule with the internet down (network is used for time sync only). | None: no app, no account, no Wi-Fi, no subscription. Everything is set on the device itself. JALL manual; Tom's Guide |
| Power-outage behavior | If power returns mid-dawn, a catch-up mode rejoins the sunrise where it should be. Every alarm decision is logged on-device, so you can see exactly what fired and why. | All functions stop during a power outage; a built-in button cell preserves your settings only. JALL user manual |
| Will it work in 10 years? | Built from standard parts (ESP32 controller and commodity LED strips), with over-the-air firmware updates and no server anywhere that can take it down. | Lifetime warranty via email registration. The build is budget-grade: roughly a dozen side buttons that reviewers say send you back to the instruction booklet, and a speaker Vice calls tinny. Tom's Guide; Vice |
| Price | Pre-launch. Join the waitlist for first-run access | ~$35 (varies by revision)Tom's Guide ($34.95) |
Where the JALL genuinely wins
- 545 lux at one foot in an independent 15-clock light-meter test (OptimizeYourBiology)
- Fully standalone, no app, account, cloud, or subscription anywhere
- Two alarms, 20 brightness levels, FM radio, and a nightlight for around $35, per its manual and Tom's Guide
- Lifetime warranty (via email registration) is unheard of at this price
Choose the JALL if: you want to find out whether sunrise waking works for you at the lowest possible stakes: it's the honest entry ticket to the category.
And if the dawn itself is what you care about
That's the gap Horizn exists to fill. Join the waitlist for first-run access, or read the guides to see how we think.