Discovered via @Philcr & @MsUkStudents

So for Christmas I got a nice little iPod dock/alarm clock, and ever since I got it I have wondered why what I would think should be fairly easy integration wasn’t done which would make using the dock much simpler.

Now the obvious integration features with iPod docks are obviously the play functions (play, pause, skip etc) but why stop there?

I was slightly puzzled why I would need to set a basic thing like the time on the dock when I am plugging a device which knows the time into it! Why couldn’t it sync the time with the iPod? Surely that should be a very simple function…

Of course this extends further to things like the alarms themselves, why couldn’t they be set to the iPod alarm times?

Of course I can understand that many of these functions might be different for each iPod dock… However one of the great things about the iPod (at least the iPod Touch and iPhone) is the Apple App Store; which leads me to wonder why there can’t simply be a nice little custom App which can interact with the dock and allow the user to set the functions and settings for the dock and alarms using the nice 3.5″ touch screen display instead of some fiddly archaic buttons?!

All of this seems like simple things which would make the end user experience for using Apple iPod/iPhones with docking devices much smoother and user-friendly.

Now as with all things I am more than happy for someone to correct me if I am wrong and to hear your thoughts… So what do you think? Why is Apple/dock manufacturers missing this potential?