Comments on: Can Mobile Phones Think?

By: Ricky Cadden

Ricky Cadden — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 18:40:47 +0000

I’ve been using Locale for my Nexus One (and now my G2) for this specific purpose – it’s basically the same type of app – it doesn’t really ‘learn’ or ‘think’, but rather reacts to various triggers based on location, situation, etc.

The problem that these types of apps have, currently, is the false triggers. Users will expect these apps to work flawlessly, and few people want to give software the chance to ‘learn’ from them.

It took me about a month of actively noting my actions/preferences before I got Locale to work exactly how I want it. There are still a few things I need to tinker with, and I’ve been using it for 6 months or so now.

Nokia Situations has some serious potential – combined with Nokia Bots (which really did learn from your behaviour) – it can be a real game-changer.

Unfortunately, as Om pointed out, Nokia’s awesome at innovating and then not capitalizing on it. For examples, see QR Codes, front-facing cameras, full desktop browsing, app stores, etc.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 20:14:43 +0000

Eric

Clearly this is a starting point and perhaps we will end up at a point where the phones become more self learning and intuitive. That is why I said — Nokia needs to make it their top priority and push the envelope.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 19:14:02 +0000

I purchased a utility on my Nokia E71 that allowed me to set up rules like “Silence phone when any calendar event has the word ‘meeting’ in it; back to ringer when event ends”. (I think my Treo could do this, too, with an add-on.) OK, not intelligence per se – very nice, though, and something I wish my iPhone could do. Apple focused on UI responsiveness and simplicity, both very good things. I hope, as hardware gets better and better, we can eventually have the best of both worlds.
Maybe a device should not be called a smart phone unless it does things for you. Things like noticing patterns in usage, locations, contacts and calendar events. Warning me when traffic is unusually bad on the commute I do every morning. Automatically downloading podcasts it notices I like to listen to.
There are some apps now that change their behavior based on time of day, e.g. Instapaper and TomTom GPS automatically use night mode when it’s nighttime. The umbrellatoday.com app isn’t a phone feature exactly, but it also simplifies my life. I guess it’s a start.

By: Shay

Shay — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 14:25:50 +0000

I am also a former Local (for Android) user. The app does everything you mention basically, but it also comes with plug-in and additions you can download once you have the app itself (for example, I download a plug in for Google talk for my phone which starts up my Google talk up everytime I leave my house and turn it off when I get back)

Other uses I had for it:
- turning off my ringer and put the phone on vibrate when I’m teaching at my part time job

- integrate with my to do list and notify me when I’m around a place that’s on it (for example, if I pass the supermarket on the way home, an alert would go off and a message saying “get meat” will show up.)

- turn off the wifi and mobile network at night automatically, so the phone because a “dumb” alarm clock and doesn’t bother me with loud alerts when someone updates their twitter (sometimes I forget to do that manually)

- more stuff…

I uninstalled the app recently because my phone is crawling with too many services already. I will probably install it again when I get a new phone. Try it out!

By: n900 user

n900 user — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 12:24:18 +0000

there are quite a few apps for maemo that do similar things.

it will be exciting when meego is released and we can have apps like this too because it will make porting them a breeze.

By: neil martin

neil martin — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:23:47 +0000

What a great idea. I have been in business meetings or churches and heard phones going in full ringtone mode.

By: Tero Ojanpera

Tero Ojanpera — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 09:48:49 +0000

You are absolutely on target with this post. Context awareness is progressing rapidly and at Nokia it is one of a number of ways we can deliver more consumer value. Just to be clear, when it comes to connecting the real world with new opportunities enabled by the digital world, my team and others at Nokia are indeed focused to follow through on innovations (our own and those of 3rd party developers) by increasingly integrating Ovi services into the core functionality of our devices.

P.S. Nice to see you are using your Nokia N8 birthday gift!

By: ronald

ronald — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 20:27:49 +0000

I don’t know what intelligence is. So sorry.
We learn not from example but from observation, which covers examples. It’s the same with learning, people say they have build a learning system. Which can just recognize or memorize, but learning is self organization. Which covers recognition and memorization(with delays, speed differential is important here, builds the underpinnings of the
addressing scheme, which is important for smart search …) and the building and organization of abstracts.
Context is very important in all of this. I could go on for ever.
Anyway to give an example of the power, a Notebook i3 with 4g Mem, can read over 90% of all(tested, ~100) (re)captcha’s in under 3 minutes/captcha. Context does not only give meaning to “mean”, but also
to the abstraction of chars. In other words it scales from a number of pixels to very large data sets.
Here’s another one:
The author either has no clue what context is and how it’s created and processed or he’s doing an incredible good job of concealing it.
What he really want’s to do is calculating the information value of any given article for any given person. But for that he needs context which consists of past(memory),present, and future (predictions, goals). My guess, a 12 core personal cluster(2 AMD 6 core, 16G, with 2-4 fast bonded networks and a really big pipe [to Google, somebody got to categorize it first]) will be 100 times better at this than he can ever imagine what’s possible.
No “intelligence” required.

By: Caroline

Caroline — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 09:11:46 +0000

Wow, this looks to me as a very sensible and great app. The first time that I run into something that my iPhone cannot do.
Maybe next phone will be an Android? :-)

By: Sadagopan

Sadagopan — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 03:02:58 +0000

Tasker on Android is perhaps amongst the top few best applications in the entire mobile ecosystem. Fabulous application that justifies calling Android phone with Tasker as real smartphone!