I bought this five days ago, but have yet to successfully set the alarm.
Ran through all the steps, but thankfully, set up a back up on my iPad.
I read your Philips official reply that the alarm clock is an incidental extra.
you should put that on the box and save me a trip back to the store for a refund.

We do like this product especially Bluetooth connection from iPod is great and very good sound. However, tuning instructions and doing presets is annoying and difficult to say the very least!! Extremely frustrating as instructions are NOT clear at all as it puts a presumption there that it will do these presets for you on auto. no it doesn't and have to manually do each one. Trying to do it manually requires a masters degree as it does not automatically move along to next empty preset so have to move past the already preset stations before hitt...

I bought this mainly to use as a clock radio and for the fast iPhone lightning charger. I've found it very hard to set and still haven't worked out how to turn the alarm OFF automatically each day. The quick start guide and downloaded manuals are not particularly helpful or user friendly. I'm seriously considering using this as an iPhone dock/clock and re-instating the simple 18 year old Bose Wave clock radio/alarm (with remote control) it replaced.

The Philips DTB297 needs a remote control, especially to control the alarm. Has Philips considered that people may not want an electrical appliance within an arms length or get out of bed to use the snooze button or operate the radio/dock/alarm?

Maybe I am unlucky but I have found this radio quite hard to 'program' ie to select the stations that you want to add to the 20 memory channels. Using the Errata information that modifies the sequence of actions required to add a chosen channel to a chosen memory, storing the channel is Very hit or miss. One of the problems is that the right hand button (labelled preset / tuning) is very intermittent, if you are lucky, you will store the radio program you want on the memory that you want, more often though, this wont happen !
This Radio is going back to John Lewis.
Nice styling, useful Ipod dock ( but not for model 4, only works with Ipod model 5 )
Hard to program a radio channel to a memory position. It is too expensive also.