[Editor's note: this was originally posted to the Dillfrog Forums by Plat a few years back; re-posted here by request]

Wow, unless I’m missing something, this seems like a pretty lame “invention” to come out of “Emerson Research”.

I recently bought a SmartSet clock radio, thinking it would use the radio waves to calibrate the clock (so if the power went out and the battery went out, the clock would automatically set itself properly). The clock set itself just dandily after plugging it in, but then I became curious about how to force it to re-calibrate the time.

I couldn’t find anything in the manual on how to do this (if the battery dies, the manual instructs you to manually set the clock’s time)! So I googled around without much luck, then I visited their (“Under Construction”) Web site at www.emersonradio.com with no leads.

So I figured, since they were bragging about the SmartSet (R) technology (“…Someday all clocks and clock radios may be this smart. But today the technology is only available from Emerson Research.”), I could look up the patent number (6,567,344) to see exactly what it was about.

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