Llama - Location Aware Mobile Application

[smilodon]

There are a few location aware apps available on Android. Location aware apps are those that are able to work out your location (who'd have thought), or rough location and to change settings based on those locations. For example they can turn on WiFi when you come close to your home or office WiFi networks and turn it off again when you leave. They also generally have the ability to be time aware as well, so you could have your phone set to vibrate between 2pm and 4pm on a Thursday if that's the time of your weekly meeting with the Boss, and so on....

The two best known are Locale and Tasker. However Locale costs £6.10 and Tasker is £3.99. I've not used Locale but Tasker is a huge (as in complexity not size) app and has a very steep learning curve. There is almost nothing it cannot do. However this means it's a major exercise in button pushing to get it to do anything. It's also easy to get things wrong and break your 'tasks' with no real indication of what you've messed up.

So for anyone looking for a free, simple to use but full featured location and time aware app you could try out Llama. It has all the basic features required and primarily works by obtaining your location from Network mast locations, so it doesn't use battery drinking GPS. The WiFi aware part of the app is in Beta, but seems to work for me. I've been running it for a day or two, mainly to turn WiFi on and off and to silence the phone at night.

Another app that controls WiFi based on location is Juice Defender. However this app is more a battery saving app than an automation one so may not be appropriate for just being used as such.

One thing I'd like to see but that has been turned of by Android is the ability to turn the lock code screen on and off by location. I'd like to have it automatically disable itself when I'm at home but turn on when I leave the house. Sadly that's not possible for me. While there are a few apps (Tasker included) that claim to be able to do that non seem to work consistently with my version of Android (OxygenRom 2.1.2).

Anyway Llama is free so give it a whirl.