Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Change Profiles Based on Time

Automatically change a profile based on time and location. This lets you make the phone adjust to its environment, without user intervention.

While changing the profile by hand is easy, many users still forget to do it. You often hear mobile phones ringing in meetingssomeone forgot to switch to their Meeting profile. Wouldn't it be nice if the phone could automatically switch to different profiles based on the time of day, or even the phone's location? Well, you can do that with Nokia smartphones.

Although it is easy to change profiles using the Power key, people still often forget to do so. It is embarrassing to have your phone ring in the middle of a movie or a presentation, and the scramble to find the phone in your bag or briefcase is comical at best. Using a small Symbian program from Psiloc, called Extended Profiles Pro (available for purchase from http://www.psiloc.com/index.html?id=156), you can change profiles at preset times on Series 60 devices.

Some non-Nokia devices support changing profiles based on calendar events. For instance, if the calendar knows you will be in a movie from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., the phone can be automatically switched to the Meeting profile during that time. Unfortunately, this functionality is not available on Nokia phones.

Extended Profiles Pro does not support Series 40 devices. However, the Series 40 native profile manager allows you to set an expiration time for each profile when you activate it

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