Welcome to the world of the future! In the future your iPhone will be able to tell you where you are and then adapt to those locations, turning things on and off (ringer, etc.), changing wallpaper (from Megan Fox to cute kittens in church), and from earth to space when you go on an intergalactic trip to free the citizens of Mars from the evil Cohaagen. Perhaps you ringtone could change to this?
Basically this is a patent for something folks have been thinking about for years – targeted messaging based on time and location. Advertisers would love this but I doubt many of us want to be reminded by our iPhone to turn off our Shout The Devil ringtone while talking to the Dalai Lama.
The iPhone would show “life events,” life events being:
any location-based event (e.g., the device entering or exiting a specific geographical location, such as a country, or a specific type of location, such as a movie theater, etc.), any environment-based event (e.g., the device being subjected to a specific physical orientation, movement, temperature, sound, light, etc.), any calendar-based event (e.g., the device reaching a specific time of day, day of week, date, etc.), any usage-based event (e.g., the device being used for a specific function, for a specific period of time, the device’s battery having less than half of its capacity remaining, etc.), any news-based event (e.g., the device receiving information about a particular worldly occurrence, such as a weather forecast, news report, or sport score, etc.), and combinations thereof.
That’s not all! Another patent adds phone calls to the calendar, ensuring you can dial your appointments with one press. In addition to this you’ll also see a screen that shows what your contacts are currently doing – working out, dancing, seeing a man about a horse – and will adjust your contact methods accordingly.
This is obviously all pie-in-the-sky stuff and far too complex to ever make it into the iPhone in the form advertised. We’ll see how it pops up later when they streamline the actual interface.
Location based events are already available on Symbian phones. My Nokia E71 can go to silent mode when I am at work or in a movie theater…
Umm have you seen locale for Android?
Yes, the Android app “Locale” does much of this. There aren’t location type or phone orientation based events, but some other apps in the Android Market are touching on that too.
That last image looks amazing, it’s something I’ve wanted for a while now.
A lot of times, I’ll be on the phone or computer finishing up something and someone calls me, but I won’t be ready to take it for 2-3 minutes. I’d like to have a button I can press that tells a specific message to the other person, like they can wait on the line for 3 minutes if they want. It would be a lot nicer compared to ignoring the call, getting a voicemail, and then calling them back right away. That seems like wasted effort and in a lot of those situations, I won’t have listened to the voicemail because I knew why they were calling.
I also want to start seeing more iphone to iphone features – I think that will drive a lot more people to getting it.
Mac had this back in OS 7. Location Manager and it would switch my networks, printers, lots of stuff.
So it’d be nice to finally get that back…
iPhones are just the best, love the touch screen technology.
Thanks for the informative post.