turn your android phone into an automated superphone

[CranialBlaze]

Yeah, I understand that. You have the option of using multiple towers to create a more defined location. Are there no more towers to connect to ? At home, I have 10 different cells connected(of course, I would think its only 3 that really give the location) and in the case of area 2 its 2 towers. They have a slight amount of overlap, so I use the condition of being connected to my home Wifi as a final check.

I have a place that I frequent thats about 200m away from my house and it knows when I'm in either of these areas. Of course, there are blind spots such as when I'm in the bathroom and it thinks I'm in the other location.

The thing about wifi is when I'm in location 1 (home) then its wifi on, mobile data off, auto sync on, brightness lowered. When I'm in location 2 then its the opposites as I keep the Wifi off to conserve data because it won't be connecting to anything, but I'm guessing you use Wifi in both places ?

Never seen more than 1 tower to connect to near my house, but I live in a fairly open area, as far as I know there are less than 5 towers withing 20km of me.
My brightness is permanently on minimum, phone works great like that, I have wifi everywhere, there are only a handful of spots where I do not have a wifi connection. Wifi just uses so little power it a waste to turn it off in most cases. I also have my wifi scan interval decreased from the standard of 15 seconds to 2 minutes.

AUtosync is never off, not that I really care but I have onavo extend for data compression, save about 60% on my very rare data usages.

As for profiles I have about 7 active profiles switching between work and everywhere else, then I have GPS toggles for apps, auto volume for my headphones, data toggle when on wifi, Wake-On_lan for my computers, then a few manual tasks like sleep mode that turns down my volumes and up my alarm, signs out of GTalk, puts the phone in airplane mode and turns off my file-server.

Wake up to do pretty much the opposite.

I cn get the benefit in location scanning for something without mostly constant wifi, but the cell tower scanning still uses more battery than having left wifi on. GSM signal usage is one of the most battery intensive operations on a phone, wifi uses up to 70% less than 3G and 40% less than EDGE, can only imagine what the difference is when compared to HSDPA+. I am actually considering getting a mini 3G router with cellc, cheaper data and then I never need to switch my phone off wifi.

 

[Dylan_G]

Never seen more than 1 tower to connect to near my house, but I live in a fairly open area, as far as I know there are less than 5 towers withing 20km of me.
My brightness is permanently on minimum, phone works great like that, I have wifi everywhere, there are only a handful of spots where I do not have a wifi connection. Wifi just uses so little power it a waste to turn it off in most cases. I also have my wifi scan interval decreased from the standard of 15 seconds to 2 minutes.

AUtosync is never off, not that I really care but I have onavo extend for data compression, save about 60% on my very rare data usages.

As for profiles I have about 7 active profiles switching between work and everywhere else, then I have GPS toggles for apps, auto volume for my headphones, data toggle when on wifi, Wake-On_lan for my computers, then a few manual tasks like sleep mode that turns down my volumes and up my alarm, signs out of GTalk, puts the phone in airplane mode and turns off my file-server.

Wake up to do pretty much the opposite.

I cn get the benefit in location scanning for something without mostly constant wifi, but the cell tower scanning still uses more battery than having left wifi on. GSM signal usage is one of the most battery intensive operations on a phone, wifi uses up to 70% less than 3G and 40% less than EDGE, can only imagine what the difference is when compared to HSDPA+. I am actually considering getting a mini 3G router with cellc, cheaper data and then I never need to switch my phone off wifi.

How do you do the wake on LAN ? Would love to know...

 

[CranialBlaze]

Check the market, WoL Wan if u just want to turn it on, or Rocket Launcher if u wanna turn it off as well.

Both intergrate with tasker, RL is a bit easier to setup in tasker, but WoL Wan lets you assign names to your pcs and create groups.

 

[Necropolis]

This does the trick for me.

Have an NFC stick programmed to launch the WOL app - so when I get home from work I put my S3 down on the sticker and my PC starts up

 

[CranialBlaze]

This does the trick for me.

Have an NFC stick programmed to launch the WOL app - so when I get home from work I put my S3 down on the sticker and my PC starts up

Thats just so much more effort, not to mention having to buy and programme nfc stickers. All I have to do is be withing 20m of my house.Something I do each day when I get home.

 

[DominionZA]

I used Tasker for a long time, but now use Llama. Just preference.

When my phone disconnects from my home access points, my Bluetooth switches on. By the time I reverse out the drive my cell has paired with the car Bluetooth.
When at the office, cell connects to office WiFi and Bluetooth switches off again. So on...

In the car I have my old Desire HD as a permanent Nav device for maps and Waze. When it disconnects from my home office wifi (right by the gate), Waze fires up and screen to full brightness. Toggles when I get to the office.

Then all the standard volume adjustments based on time of day.

 

[CoolBug]

Interesting that the Motorola smart actions allows you access to toggle the gps

 

[Maddmatt]

Dont blame the app, google made the choice to block app acces to gps toggle, and depending on what phone you have rooting may not b enough, if u on aosp then you need to flash a custom rom, touchwiz and htc sense open the lock partially as they put in gps toggles so with secure settings u can enable tasker gps with just rooting.

That is exactly what the GPS toggle is supposed to do. It does not physically turn your GPS on and off. It blocks apps from accessing your GPS.
Just leave GPS turned on. It is only physically powered up when an app does a location request.

 

[Necropolis]

Thats just so much more effort, not to mention having to buy and programme nfc stickers. All I have to do is be withing 20m of my house.Something I do each day when I get home.

You can call that WOL app from tasker so you don't have to use NFC stickers

 

[CoolBug]

That is exactly what the GPS toggle is supposed to do. It does not physically turn your GPS on and off. It blocks apps from accessing your GPS.
Just leave GPS turned on. It is only physically powered up when an app does a location request.

If that's the case, why give you the option of turning it off?

Anyways, my navigation dock arrived today so for me I use that as a trigger in smart actions to enable the things I want to use while driving, like gps, turn off sync, brightness etc, when you dismount from the nav dock the phone goes back to how it was before you docked it.

I dono maybe I'm weird but I've tried apps like Llama and Juice Defender, I'd rather just control toggles myself. It's not so bad when there are apps that allow you to put toggles in your notification area as well as lock screen.
I do use smart actions but only for driving and turning my phone on silent when I go to weekly meetings at work.

I've been tempted to buy tasker, maybe you guys really use it but for me it will be a waste

Oh and I am so going to be playing with that wol app.

 

[CranialBlaze]

That is exactly what the GPS toggle is supposed to do. It does not physically turn your GPS on and off. It blocks apps from accessing your GPS.
Just leave GPS turned on. It is only physically powered up when an app does a location request.

Yep, someone completely misunderstands the meaning of the term off. Its amazing how battery life exponentially increases when you turn it off however its apparently never off. Makes perfect sense.

 

[CoolBug]

Yep, someone completely misunderstands the meaning of the term off. Its amazing how battery life exponentially increases when you turn it off however its apparently never off. Makes perfect sense.

Strange, maybe this is purely anecdotal but I also find I have huge battery life increases after I turn it "off"

 

[CoolBug]

Weird, I tried 2 WOL apps and they don't seem to be starting my PC.

Splashtop however seems to do the trick?

Silly though, I've been messing with WOL settings for so long and it takes 1 minute for the PC to start.

 

[Park@82]

I use fing to sent WOL...

 

[Maddmatt]

If that's the case, why give you the option of turning it off?

So you can block apps from using it. If it was running all the time your battery life would be more like 3 hours.

When it is actually powered on you see the GPS icon in the notification bar.

After all it wouldn't make sense to have the user manually turn the GPS on before starting a GPS app and then manually turn it off again when they're done, when it's simple for the software to do that itself.

That is why apps are not allowed access to the GPS toggle. It's for when you want to block the GPS for any reason.

Here's another source if you're worried that I don't know what I'm talking about:
http://help.seekdroid.com/kb/features/unchecking-use-gps-does-not-save-battery

And another:
http://androidforums.com/incredible-support-troubleshooting/117010-turn-off-gps-save-battery.html

 

[CoolBug]

Wow okay, thanks thats very interesting