While doing my research for my Context Awareness on Symbian article yesterday, I stumbled upon two interesting facts. The first one is that context-aware applications are now available on a lot of platforms, like Locale on Android which happens to offer a very similar experience to Best Profiles (with a few bonuses and minus the application launching benefit), as well as MyProfiles, iComing and aTimeTool on the iPhone (although all three are only available for the jailbroken devices, as Apple stupidly won’t allow background processes). The second fact is that there’s only a handful of these applications for each platform, which is a shame compared to location-aware applications.
Location awareness and location-based services have been blossoming all around us lately, taking the mobile scene by storm on all platforms from Symbian to OS X, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile… Even Nokia is putting a lot at stake to back up this strategy. It seems that all the rage nowadays is about “where” you are and who/what is “around you”. Context-awareness though has taken a backseat to this cacophony of location services, and it’s a challenge to find decent applications or services that not only care about where you are, but also about the what you’re doing and when. Which got me thinking about the reasons for this schism.
Image courtesy of Geek and Poke.
Location-awareness is only one aspect of context awareness as a whole, and so far has proven to be the easiest one to implement. Why? Any context aware service relies on 1. asking a question and 2. providing possibilities deeply tied to the answer given to the first question. For location-awareness, the question is “where are you?” and the answer is given by simply as launching the GPS or cell-triangulation. The second part relies on a database of people or places. Little human interaction or intelligence is needed in both parts of the problem, with the only human factor being you clicking to choose whether you want to see restaurants, hospitals, or friends around you…
Context awareness, as a whole concept though, asks a lot more questions:
- Where are you?
- What are you doing? And for how long will you be doing it?
- Are you going anywhere?
- What time is it?
- Who is with you?
- What are your personal preferences? What are the preferences of the people with you?
If context-awareness relied only on rigid data, it could easily go wrong. Take time-scheduling for example. I said that my phone goes on Silent profile at night and General profile during the day/evening, but what if I was a night-worker? If the process was automated without any input from me, things could and would go wrong. That’s why all context-aware applications, like Best Profiles or Locale or MyProfiles only work when you program them according to your needs. At least for now.
It will be interesting to watch this space to see how things evolve from here. Will someone provide an application that works in the background for a week, intelligently watching how/when/where you change profiles, launch applications, switch bluetooth or wifi, call or SMS people… on your phone, and then provide you with an estimate algorythm to automate some of these tasks for you, while always collecting more data and improving the algorythm the more you use your device? I guess that sort of mobile intelligence is coming, sooner rather than later.
