The iPhone may be great at just about everything it does, with the exception of being a reliable alarm clock -- it turns out that non-recurring alarms failed as the clock rolled into the New Year. Maybe Apple figured everyone would be partying in Times Square?

MacRumors has a summary of the weekend’s latest alarm clock snafu courtesy of Apple. As first discovered by Engadget, the iPhone’s built-in Clock app failed to trigger non-recurring alarms properly on New Year’s Day, making the otherwise sturdy app appear to be a questionable choice of alarm clock when it comes to reliability.

“I was able to confirm this after a couple of false starts,” reported Macworld. “For the bug to show itself, your iOS device must actually tick over from 11:59 p.m. on December 31, 2010 to 12:00 a.m. on January 1, 2011.”

Like many of these annoying little bugs, there happened to be a simple workaround: Just set up your alarm as a recurring event and all will be well.

Since then, Apple has officially acknowledged the problem, which clears itself up on Monday, January 3 -- presumably, until the next hidden date bug bites us in the rear.

"We're aware of an issue related to non repeating alarms set for January 1 or 2," Apple spokeswoman Natalie Harrison confirmed to Macworld. "Customers can set recurring alarms for those dates and all alarms will work properly beginning January 3."

Lesson to be learned here? Always have some kind of backup alarm clock handy, even if it’s one of the many third-party iOS apps that don’t seem to have such problems.

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(Image courtesy of MacRumors and Macworld)