GLOBAL – The team at Nokia Beta Labs have released a test version of the new Situations app which allows your phone to behave usefully according to the context it finds itself in. You do this by creating rules defining certain Situations and the way your phone should act when it finds itself in these: it’s like the Profile changer achieved self-awareness. All the details after the break.

When Situations is first opened, you see a list of the current Profiles available on your device. The real fun starts when you create a new one or use the Options to make a current profile automated.

This is where you get to define the rules that define a particular Situation. There are a wide variety of parameters here, using almost all your phone’s sensors. A Situation can be defined according to the time, day, GPS location, network location (i.e. the cell ID), availability of particular WiFi networks and the presence of particular Bluetooth devices. As an example, we set up a Situation for the office, as defined by the GPS location.

The next step is to decide how you want your device to behave when it finds itself in this particular Situation. This isn’t a simple matter of how loud you want the ringtone: in fact there’s three screenfuls of potential actions:

As well as the normal Profile options, you’ll notice the ability to open a particular app or bookmark. If you set up the Office Situation, for example, you might want your ringtone turned down, and to open up an industry news bookmark so that you can get up-to-date as soon as you arrive. If you were to set up a situation for night hours, you might set your phone into power-saving mode and switch off Bluetooth.

Once your Situations are set up and set to automatic, your phone will switch profile as you move or as the day passes, according to the criteria you’ve set.

Situations is available to download and install from the Beta Labs for a wide variety of Nokia smartphones (from S60 v3 FP2 devices like the Nokia 6700 slide to the latest Nokia N8, C7 and C6-01 models). Note that this isn’t a finished, polished application. It’s currently described as an experimental prototype, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t always behave the way you expect it to or is unstable. Regular readers may have already tried out Nokia Bots and Nokia Feel, similar experiments into adding automation and rudimentary AI to mobile devices. It’ll be very interesting to see where the combination of Bots and Situations that respond the way you Feel is going to take us.

Have you had a go at Situations yet? If so, what do you think?

image credit: aussiegall