Best Profiles allows scheduling of phone Profiles, using the following rules:

• Schedule
• Calendar Rules
• GSM / Cell Location
• Phone Charging

Personally, I find the Schedule and Calendar Rules triggers the most useful which are described below.

The following screen shot shows an example of the Schedule Rules configuration:

So, in this example, the ‘Work’ profile will activate at 8.30 from Monday to Friday, while ‘Normal’ profile will activate on these days at 5.05pm. Loud ring or SMS tones at work tends to annoy everyone in the area.

Phone profiles can be changed based upon Calendar Rules: Calendar Rules consist of keywords that will trigger a profile change per Calendar entry. Best Profile will look for these keywords in Calendar entries as they begin. Here is an example:

The set up above will instruct the phone to switch to ‘Normal’ profile on the public holidays that have been entered into the Calendar. So, ‘Normal’ profile will become active on 12am Canada Day.

Each rule can be defined a priority, lowest, low, normal, high etc. So, for the Calendar Rules, each entry has been defined ‘Highest’. This will ensure the Calendar Rules will overwrite the Schedule Rule configuration, therefore, the phone won’t change to ‘Work’ profile on Canada Day at 8.30am, for example. Of course, you could also have keywords such as “Cinema” or “Meeting” to change the profile to ’Offline’ or ‘Silent’.

I tried using the Cell Location Rule for changing profiles but unfortunately this didn’t work so well. The idea was that when I’d get into work, the ‘Work’ profile would activate, and when leaving the office, ‘Normal’ profile would re-activate. Unfortunately cell locations overlapped and so the phone spent its time switching between the two profiles. Best Profile provides Cell logger so you can identify cell IDs in a particular location.

This is an application I’d definitely miss: I no longer have to worry about turning off my phone at night, changing to ‘Normal’ and ‘Work’ profiles as necessary, since its all automatic. Best Profiles loads when the phone is turned on and runs in the background.

There are more features that others will definitely find useful. I’ve just described what I find most useful in Best Profiles.

At $14.95, Best Profiles is definitely great value.

Tags: Symbian, S60, Nokia, Software