If you’re going to spend a cool eight grand on a bed, said bed might as well come with all the bells and whistles. And believe me, this bed comes with all the bells and whistles.
For starters, it’s a Sleep Number bed, so you get the ability to adjust how firm or soft your side is independently from your partner’s side. Fine. Each side can also have the angles of the head and feet adjusted, a la a Comforest adjustable bed. Splendid.
Now here’s where things start to get interesting: The damn bed has a damn wireless connection. It can connect via Wi-Fi to your home network and/or your smartphone via Bluetooth.
Why is this necessary? Because a bunch of sensors built into the bed can track your sleep patterns, relaying your sleepy-time data to a connected app that gives you a sleep score. You can compete with your partner to see who gets the best sleep score, or compete with yourself to try to better your own score. Yes, you try to sleep better.
There’s more. This is an $8,000 bed, after all. There’d better be more.
Does your partner snore? Just hit the Partner Snore button on the included wireless remote control (see photos below), and the head section of your partner’s side of the bed will tilt six degrees upward – just enough to get them to stop snoring.
And the rich get richer.
Also, the damn bed plugs into all your bedside lamps, so you can set your lights to turn off at a certain time or just turn them off from the remote. I keep swearing not because I’m mad at this damn bed, but because I’m mad at my own bed, which is a pathetic slab of disappointment filled only with springs and failure. The only tech anywhere near my bed is a wireless router underneath it that gives me headaches.
The bed also has tasteful ambient lighting that shoots out from under it in a sort of nightlight mode. And the damn thing does full-body massage, because of course it does.
Oh, and it’s comfortable, too. There’s memory foam. I sprawled out on it like Kate Winslet in Titanic, if Kate Winslet was a man, had a beer gut and was fully clothed in the middle of a trade show. Just thinking about it makes me angry about this ridiculous hotel chair I’m sitting in right now.
So while a big theme of this year’s CES gadget show in Vegas has been wearable technology, Select Comfort has decided to turn the concept somewhat on its head. Instead of wearing a gadget to bed — say on your wrist — the entire x12 bed itself acts as a sleep tracker, monitoring your heart rate and how often you move around during the night. In the morning, you can review your data, saying, “Oh, looks like I only had four aggressive episodes of night terrors last night. We’re gettin’ there!” And don’t forget all the other stuff it does, too. This damn bed.
The x12 goes on sale on February 8 in a queen-size version for $8,000. Subsequent sizes and price points will roll out over the rest of the year, including a king-size version that’ll clear ten grand. If you’re not quite well-heeled enough the spend that kind of dough on an item you’ll spend much of your life in, the company is looking to make some of the above features available as options on all of its beds – which start at around $1,000 — by the end of the year.
Sleep Number x12 [SleepNumber.com]