Locale or Setting Profiles?

[tsunamikitsune]

I'm extremely interested in an app that does different things with my phone depending on time or location, but I'm not sure which is best.

Ideally, a few of the things I'd like it to do would be to mute my phone at work, turn on Wi-Fi at home, max brightness when plugged into my car dock, and open my music player when I plug headphones in.

Locale looks really polished and nice, with a lot of plug-in support (being able to update my Gtalk status depending on location seems handy), but it's also a bit expensive and I hear a lot of stories about it not working well. I don't think I'd mind paying $10 for it if it works, so are these stories no longer true thanks to updates, or is it still bad?

The other popular option seems to be Setting Profiles, but I don't know much about it. It's cheaper, but does it have any of the features Locale gets through plugins?

 

[Dmtalon]

I can't answer whether or not Setting Profiles has all the same features as Locale, but it sounds like you want to do what I wanted to do, and I chose Setting Profiles.

I have my phone go silent at night (no sound or led blink) from 11pm - 6am At 8am I have it go into work mode which turns off active sync (so I'm not managing email on my PC AND phone wifi/bluetooth/gps off, quieter ring etc..). When an event is in my exchange calender it puts my phone into silent mode as well (i.e. during meetings)

When I plug in my headphones I have it set a mild volume as apparently android doesn't have it's own built in tracking for headphone / speaker volume.

At first I tried using location based stuff so it would use "home" when I was home and "work" at work, but I didn't have a lot of luck with it. Of course I'm pretty stingy with keeping the actual GPS on so that could have been part of the problem.

But as for time/event based profiles it's working quite well... I had a windows mobile phone and used Phone Alarm, this is sort of a fancy version of that.

Hope that helps some.

 

[InstantKarma]

At first I tried using location based stuff so it would use "home" when I was home and "work" at work, but I didn't have a lot of luck with it. Of course I'm pretty stingy with keeping the actual GPS on so that could have been part of the problem.

Setting Profiles doesn't use GPS at all, so that's not the problem. It only uses cell tower IDs for location. It's not super accurate, but does the trick for me.

I have had times where it just wouldn't change location-based profiles, but that went away after an update (or T-Mobile updated it's tower info, not sure).

 

[zurloid]

I'm writing an app that has some of the feature you require. Details on this page:

LocationBot

Although I'm planning on charging for it eventually, there's a free version that permits 2 configured locations as well as a third, default profile for when you are not in range of any configured location.

It's beta at present so please feel free to let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions for improvements.