Nokia’s New "Situations" App Makes Phones Self-Aware

Handset maker Nokia today announced the creation of an experimental app called “Nokia Situations” that can automatically adjust the phone’s behavior for various situations and contexts. For example, the app could shut off the ringer whenever you go into a meeting, without you having to explicitly change settings on the device.

According to the application’s description, Nokia Situations is able to “sense” things like the time of day, your location, what networks you’re connected to, and then adjust one or more phone settings accordingly.

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To enable the device to act on any given situation, users have to configure the application to watch for certain conditions (no, it’s not that smart – you do have to train it first). You can configure the phone to watch for things like specific time periods, active days, calendar events, a nearby location, your current location, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connections and more. These settings can be configured in any sort of combination, not just as standalone events.

Then you can tell the phone what you want it to do when a particular situation occurs. This can include silencing the ringer or changing the ringtone, answering missed calls via an automatic SMS, turning on or off Bluetooth, changing the theme or wallpaper, automatically opening an app or changing the device mode.

Earlier this year, we reported on a similar technology for N97 devices called “Nokia Bots,” that did much of the same thing as Situations does now. The new app, however, works on a wide range of Nokia devices, including the N97/97 mini, Symbian 3 devices, S60 (3rd Ed., Feature Pack 2), Nokia C6-00, Nokia 5228, Nokia 5230, Nokia 5230 Nuron, Nokia 5235 Comes With Music Edition, Nokia 5250, Nokia 5530 XpressMusic, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Nokia X6-00 phones.

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