Llama – Make Your Phone Semi-Sentient

I am sure that everyone who is reading this article has been a victim to their phones unexpectedly ringing during an important meeting or at the movies or during a lecture, at some place where it was not suppose to start ringing, thus, causing disturbance everywhere and embarrassment to self all thanks to a minor mind slip. This tiny little mind slip might have even led to some not so tiny problems like making a bad first impression on a new client, getting kicked out of the lecture or in extreme cases, getting fired. To prevent such happenings in the future, what you need is an app called Llama – the location-aware mobile app. Llama uses phone masts to determine your location, so that you can change your ringer, vibrate and ringtones depending on where you are as well as the time of day. Llama provides you with sound profiles so you can quickly switch between quiet, loud, silent and normal sound settings. You can set your family, partner and children to ring even if your phone is set to silent! You can create events and home screen shortcuts to manage your sound profiles and more: -Silence your phone at work -Turn your Bluetooth on ready to connect your headset for a morning run -Set your phone quiet when it's late at night and you haven't gone out -Start the music player when a headset is connected Not just this, it can do a number of other functions as well: 4G APN Accounts Sync Airplane Mode Bluetooth Car mode GPS (before Android 2.3 only or Cyanogenmod) Haptic Feedback Kill Applications (also force-kill with root privileges) Play, pause and other media buttons Mobile Data (before Android 2.3 only) Reboot Run apps Run shortcuts Screen brightness Screen lock PIN/password Set Llama variables Speakerphone Screen on and off Screen timeout USB storage Vibrate Wallpaper Wifi Wifi hotspot Wifi sleep policy Llama can create events based off: Airplane mode Battery level Bluetooth devices Calendar events Car mode Charging Day of the week Current locations Headset Llama variable Music playback Phone start up and shut down Screen on and off Time of day Wifi networks While using Llama, one thing that you should keep in mind is that since GPS is not used, the location tracking is limited to the number of phone masts in your area. This will work best if you live in a populated area. If your home and work are covered by the same phone masts, you can try using the experimental Wifi-based location tracking. If that still doesn't work, you can remove the enter/exit conditions to make time-based profiles. Once you download this app, you will not have to worry about changing the sound settings of your phone again and again, especially on your busy days. The settings will keep changing according to where you are and it works both ways – just like you will not witness your phone ringing when it is not supposed to, you will also not miss any calls from home during your break time just because you forgot to put it off of silent after the various meetings.