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Do you really go to enough weddings or funerals in the same location that you'd be able to use something that keyed off GPS to change the ringer settings? I se

Do you really go to enough weddings or funerals in the same location that you'd be able to use something that keyed off GPS to change the ringer settings? I seriously hope you'd explicitly turn off the ringer in those cases.

glhaynes 17y ago
:) Good point, but I was really just using those as hyperbole. A better example is that it can't know when I'm in a meeting or not (conference rooms in my building are interspersed with offices), so I've still gotta manually silence it during meetings... that's the most common use case for silencing for me (some aren't in this same situation, but many are), and location-based auto-silencing is useless for that. So now the user has two things to keep in mind as far as silencing: which times it is programmed to do so automatically (all of which the user must be a bit suspicious of already - as you said, to be extra-sure the user would want to manually override even at those locations during times that it's really important for the ringer to be off) and which times they still have to manually override it. So we've got extra mental burden and anxiety for the user, partially or wholly overriding the savings of not having to worry about silencing in some circumstances. We're only trusting the system for those times where we'd really like it to work but it doesn't have to be guaranteed, so there's some lurking uneasiness during those times. And the user has to program it. And I'd think it's very likely to be a significant battery drain since it's needing to turn on the GPS quite often to be useful. Etc etc. Anyway, it's a super-cool sounding feature when just considered as a bullet-point, but it just strikes me as a "techno cool" feature (kind of like speech recognition and "Minority Report" interfaces) that I doubt I'll ever see widely used. I'm sure there are a few specific circumstances where it's really handy and I'm happy for those who enjoy it, but I have nearly no interest in it compared to a trusty manual switch and I think I'm speaking for the vast majority of users there. Could certainly be wrong.

glhaynes 17y ago

:) Good point, but I was really just using those as hyperbole. A better example is that it can't know when I'm in a meeting or not (conference rooms in my building are interspersed with offices), so I've still gotta manually silence it during meetings... that's the most common use case for silencing for me (some aren't in this same situation, but many are), and location-based auto-silencing is useless for that. So now the user has two things to keep in mind as far as silencing: which times it is programmed to do so automatically (all of which the user must be a bit suspicious of already - as you said, to be extra-sure the user would want to manually override even at those locations during times that it's really important for the ringer to be off) and which times they still have to manually override it. So we've got extra mental burden and anxiety for the user, partially or wholly overriding the savings of not having to worry about silencing in some circumstances. We're only trusting the system for those times where we'd really like it to work but it doesn't have to be guaranteed, so there's some lurking uneasiness during those times. And the user has to program it. And I'd think it's very likely to be a significant battery drain since it's needing to turn on the GPS quite often to be useful. Etc etc. Anyway, it's a super-cool sounding feature when just considered as a bullet-point, but it just strikes me as a "techno cool" feature (kind of like speech recognition and "Minority Report" interfaces) that I doubt I'll ever see widely used. I'm sure there are a few specific circumstances where it's really handy and I'm happy for those who enjoy it, but I have nearly no interest in it compared to a trusty manual switch and I think I'm speaking for the vast majority of users there. Could certainly be wrong.