Change Sound and Alert Settings on the Fly

Using profiles, you can change your phone's sound and alert settings with several quick clicks.

A profile is a collection of settings for the phone's ring tone, alert tones, sound volume, and vibrating alert. Using profiles, you can quickly change your phone's settings to adjust to your surroundings. For example, when you enter an important meeting, you can switch your phone into the Silent profile, which silences the ring tone and turns off all alerts, in one operation. On most Nokia devices, lightly pressing the Power button on the top of the handset brings up the available profiles. You can either use the navigation pad to select different profiles or simply tap the Power button multiple times to move the selection highlight down the list of profiles. Once you select a profile, hold down the power key or press OK (the left soft key) to activate the profile. This allows you to change profiles quickly with a minimal number of key presses.

In most professional environments, it is basic mobile phone etiquette to silence the ringer and to use vibrating alerts only. Profiles make this very easy to do.

Most phones have five built-in profiles: General, Silent, Meeting, Outdoor, and Pager. On Series 60 devices, you can customize the settings for any of these profiles using the Profiles application in the Main menu. On Series 40 devices, you can customize the profiles via the Settings Profiles Personalise menu. You can change the name of all the profiles except for the General profile.

The Keypad tone is the confirmation sound you hear when any key is pressed. The Keypad tone can get very annoying when you are working with other people in the same room. But if you turn off the Keypad tone, you will not hear the touchtone when you dial. Keep this trade-off in mind when you change those settings!

Changing profile settings is a matter of personal preference. For instance, I really need a "vibrating only" profile. So, on my devices, I always customize the Pager profile into a Vibrate profile. As a result, my phone vibrates for incoming calls, but does not make any sound, under any circumstances.

On Series 60 devices, changing the Ringing type to Silent turns off the sound for games and applications as well. On Series 40 devices, the game sound is separately configured in the Options menu for the games folder.

You can personalize profiles in many other ways as well. For example, you can change the phone's ring tone for each profile. I change the name of the Outdoor profile to Loud, and the Nokia default ring tone to something that sounds louder. The Loud profile makes sure that I can always hear when the phone rings, even if I've got music playing.