Nokia E71 Application Week – Day 5: Best Profiles
Are you a business user with a multitude of meetings each day? Are you a student with lots of classes and very evil teachers? Do you sleep at night? I suppose you answered with Yes to the last one at least. If so, then you would probably hate it to be interrupted in the middle of any of these by a loud ring just because you happened to forget to put your phone on Silent profile.
If changing profiles is a part of your daily routine and you find yourself accessing the Profiles application or pressing the power button to switch profiles a bit too often, then you might want to give a look at Best Profiles. This application offers so much more than simple profile switching it’s crazy!
First of all, it allows you to switch profiles automatically by different rule types: short-term activation, scheduling, calendar, GSM locations, charging state.
- Scheduling is pretty straight forward, as you set a certain profile to activate at a certain time and deactivate at a certain time (with the other profile it should switch to then). You can choose which days of the week this applies to.
- Short-term activation works as a one-time schedule. Let’s say that you know that you’ll be out today between 2pm, you could set it to activate the Outdoor profile at 2pm.
- Calendar allows you to associate certain keywords with profiles. For example you can set it to detect words like “Meeting” or “Class” and activate the Silent profile when the Calendar event is active.
- GSM locations is a pseudo-GPS location switching. It uses the GSM cells you are in (set it to log your cells, that way you can easily make your setup) and allows you to associate them with a certain profile. So you could for example set it for an indoor calm profile when you’re inside your house, and outdoor loud ring when you get out. It’s a very nice feature to have.
- Charger rules allows you to set certain profiles when the phone is charging or not.
Second, it adds Advanced Settings to each profile, so you can associate it with its own Wallpaper, Theme, Activation Sound, Bluetooth state, Backlight state and even choose some applications that run just when this profile is launched. I first thought that these were pretty useless, but after reading what Mike Macias has done with it, I started realizing the potential behind such a feature. I have it now set up to switch to the General profile at 8am, with a nice tune as an activation sound which is a sort of alarm for me. At the same time, it goes to a nice colorful theme (compared to the one set at night), and launches my Web browser so I can check my email and RSS, as well as Handy Weather for me to see if there’s some sun today in Paris, by any miracle. The last application it launches is Our Daily Bread, a nice way for me to start my day in faith and peace.
The best thing about Best Profiles is that each rule can have its priority, which means that if there’s a conflict at a certain moment between two possible profiles, the one with the highest priority will be the one applied.
It’s not a secret to anyone who knows me that my phones are “intelligent” and magically switch to Silent profile after midnight. Best Profiles has integrated itself into any phone I use and I totally feel lost when I don’t have it. I used to forget to switch to silent mode when I have classes, and there’s nothing more annoying than a bothered teacher who looks at you like you have no respect for him/her. I also used to forget at times to switch to silent mode at night, so I’ve been woken by stupid messages and wrong number calls at 3 or 4 am. Now all of these issues are a thing of the past. Best Profiles offers 10 days free trial so you can play around with it, after which you can purchase it at 14.95$ from the Symbian-Guru software store.
If you’d like to take a look at the other applications that we’ve featured on this week, here they are: Day 1 Cute Keys, Day 2 cCalcPro, Day 3 Chit Chat, Day 4 Mobireader.
I've also tried the Psiloc variant called MiniGPS which I thought was just slightly better. The "problem" with Psiloc products it's their heavy use of their own DRM, but besides that their products are quite great.
Basically both uses the same technique for pinpointing your location, that is uses the GSM cells to locate you.
Because of that both of the applications have the inconvenience of missing smaller spots, so if I'm at my University and moving to another room it won't neccessary detect that.
But overall they both work great. Pricewise I guess I would choose the Best Profiles application as it's cheaper (and seems to have implemented some more advanced features) and you don't need the hassle with DRM.