Video: Nokia Situations from BetaLabs – intuitive time, location and network based profile/theme (and more) changer (Demoed on Nokia N8)

Nokia Situations is a new applications from betalabs that allows your device to act in different situations (based on time, location and connectivity)

I have wanted this application since I tried something similar on my 7610 where based on locations, it could per say change profile. The 7610 for those who remember did NOT have GPS, it used cell towers to guess your locations. This is just the beginning.

Imagine something that would know you’re at work: Your profile would change perhaps to silent, themes would change to something more professional looking, network might switch to 2G permanently to save battery, your homescreen will be the “work” homescreen for email/messages and other homescreen widgets.

What’s cool is that this app can already set you to power saver mode, and also can change your Wallpaper and themes as well as open up a bookmark or app at a particular time. Only setting a default homescreen by situation is needed.

Now remember the Nokia Bots application that learns how you use your phone, changes profiles and homescreen shortcuts as you use them? Picture this with social context and the potential of a very intuitive phone that doesn’t require YOU to switch profiles or swipe to a particular homescreen. It knows pretty much what you’ll be thinking, what you’d need. Like a psychic P.A. – the 6th Sense phone (no not seeing dead people) with growing intelligence and intuition.

download it from betalabs!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik2YNxDKFIg]

Info from the beta labs page:

You can trigger any combination of the following actions in any situation:

• Change Ringtones, make the phone go silent or louder, turn vibra on/off, and all the other profile settings.
• Answer missed calls with SMS. Especially when you set your phone to silent, you can also make it reply to missed calls, from contacts in your phonebook, with a pre-defined SMS.
• Save Power. Not using phone for a while, like when sleeping? Turn Bluetooth on/off or let your phone change to power-saving mode totally.
• Change UI theme / Wallpaper. Want to make the phone look different in different situations? Change the Theme during free time vs. when you are at work.
• Open a Web bookmark or application. Want to see weather forecast for the day when you wake up? Look at the calendar as first thing? Or open your favorite TV show discussion page at show time? Or perhaps change the Device Mode when at work?

To enable the device to act on the situation, you can tell the device to watch for the following conditions (separately or in combination):

• Scheduled. Set period of time, Set active days, Set during active calendar events.
• Location. Nearby (GSM location), Current location (GPS fix), From Map (use Ovi maps)
• Connectivity. Wi-Fi (when in range), Bluetooth

Let’s discuss context-awareness instead of application features

We’d like to hear from you what you think about the concept and having this kind of capability in your phone.

More specifically, we’d like to understand how you would like your phone to behave in certain situations.  Stay tuned for different discussion toipcs, polls, and tasks over the coming weeks to explore that topic further.

The first task, though, is to download Nokia Situations, and set it up for some situations you regularly encounter and try it out for a while.

betalabs

I love the concept and the potential of these beta apps from Nokia. I hate forgetting to switch profiles back to general from setting it to silent for a meeting/lecture. This would be cool with calendar integration as well as a possible option to kill all apps at a certain time (possibly the “sleeping” mode) so I don’t inadvertently leave 14 apps in the background to eat battery and have no juice for alarm.

Having said that, having this in the background may be a major cause for concern for battery life. That’s not from experience but from speculation.

Tags: Betalabs, N8, Nokia, Nokia N8, Nseries, Situations, Timed Profiles

Category: Nokia, Nseries, Symbian, Video