There is significant overhead in all aspects of a system to make a TCP/IP request so it is best to get as much as possible in a single request. The amount of overhead to get a single playerpreference which ends up being about 40 or so bytes of real data with about the same number of overhead bytes for the protocol envelope, ergo a line efficiency of 50%

Rather than do 5 seperate TCP/IP requests I would much rather do one of the form:
    ID playerpref prefname: prefname: prefname: ...
or specifically for the alarms
    ID playerpref alarmSnoozeTime: alarmFadeTime: alarmTimeoutTime: alarmDefaultVolume: alarmEnabled:

similarly to set a bunch of prefs 
    ID playerpref prefname:value prefname:value prefname:value ... 
which just looks very similar to a set of tags on the request.

This would then handle all of the prefrences in a uniform and speedy/efficient manner. If someone told me what they all were (and meant) I would be willing to do the wiki documentation