Written by brian_houghton on Wednesday, June 30, 2010

SBSH Releases PhoneWeaver for Android

The guys over at SBSH Software have come up with some of the most useful applications for mobile devices of any over the past several years. First gracing us with PocketBreeze, PocketWeather and GoNews Touch for Windows Mobile, and then starting to diversify their portfolio, we now see the release of PhoneWeaver for the Android platform.

I’ve used PhoneWeaver on my Touch Pro for a while now, and it is nothing short of amazing, providing seamless profile management to toggle communications and ringer status depending upon my life. While an Android device isn’t here for me to try it on, I’d like to relay the news. See below!

Today, we are very excited to announce the release of PhoneWeaver for Android!

For those not familiar with PhoneWeaver for Windows Mobile, PhoneWeaver is the ultimate profiles manager! Using PhoneWeaver you can define smart profiles that are activated automatically based on time, agenda, power connection and even location! Each profile can fully control your phone sound settings, notifications, communication and much more! This way, your phone status adopts to your lifestyle like a real smart phone should!

To get PhoneWeaver for your phone, search for “PhoneWeaver” at the Android Market app.

Without any further ado, let’s kick back and get started with the fun part – getting some more information about PhoneWeaver!

PhoneWeaver for Android Introduction Video

PhoneWeaver for Android – The Details

1. Automatic Profiles – Triggers

The first and most important that PhoneWeaver allows you to do is introducing smarter profiles for your phone. By default, Android phones come with the ability to easily silent your phone and also change the ringer volume, but without any ability to create any profiles that are even a bit more advanced.

With PhoneWeaver, you can create as many profiles as you like, setting your own name and icon for your profiles, and set your own triggers for each of these profiles. Unlike basic profiles you might know from other devices, PhoneWeaver profiles are referred to as Smart Profiles because they can be activated automatically and not only manually like basic profiles. The activation method of your automatic profile is referred to as Triggers.

PhoneWeaver supports the following trigger types:

1.1. Time – The profile will automatically get activated based on time and day of week. You can configure up to four different time/days for time triggers. This is good if you wish the profile to be activated on a different hour during weekends for example.

1.2. Agenda – Profiles are activated according to your agenda. This way a profile can activate automatically when you have a meeting in your agenda and you will never forget to switch your phone to silent.

1.3. Power/Connections – This advanced option allows you to activate profiles based on different connections that link with your phone. For example, activate a profile each time you hook your phone to a car dock (for GPS use), or each time you connect an earpiece and so on…

1.4. Location – The last trigger, and probably the most exciting one, allows you to activate profiles based on your location! So you can map your working area to a specific profile, a different profile each time you reach the movies. The options are endless!

In addition to these 4 automatic profiles, a Manual trigger option also exists, allowing you to define profiles that are activated manually.

2. Smart Profiles

Each profile consist of two aspects, the first is how it is triggered (which was covered in the point above) and the second aspect of each profile is what actions it can actually do when activated.

The simple profiles that are used with other phones usually allow users to control the phone sound and sometimes also the notification sound and ringtone, but not much more than this.

With PhoneWeaver, your profiles can fully control every aspect of your phone along with some additional very cool tricks that the Smart Profiles can do. The profile actions are divided like this:

2.1. Sounds – Allows you to control pretty much every sound-related aspect of your phone. This includes ringer volume, notifications, multimedia sound, ringtones and volume for each of these and more!

2.2. Communications – Control every communication related of your phone. Set GPS state, WiFi, Bluetooth, Phone radio and more! For each communication channel like this you can either activate, disable or set to no-change, so it will be left unchanged from the previous profile.

2.3. Advanced/Other – This last section includes additional advanced options such as the ability to launch specific application once a profile is activated (for example, your GPS Maps application each time you dock your phone in the car), setting up the screen brightness in case you wish to force a certain brightness level in certain circumstances and much more!

3. Widget

In addition to powerful smart profiling, PhoneWeaver brings a few additional tools making it easier to work with your profiles. The first is the PhoneWeaver Home screen widget that you can optionally include anywhere you would like on your Android Home screen.

The PhoneWeaver widget lists the currently selected profile along with additional indicators, such as the lock icon that tells you if the current profile was selected in Lock State, or the timer countdown value, in case that the current profile was selected with a timeout value.

In addition, the PhoneWeaver widget itself also serves as a shortcut to PhoneWeaver profile selected screen, this way you can simply press the widget once to enter the profile selection dialog and switch to different profiles manually very quickly!

4. Top Bar Notification

The second optional addition PhoneWeaver brings is the top bar notification icon. When enabled, you will see a small icon at the top Android bar that denotes the currently selected profile. Since the top notification bar is always visible, this way you can always see what is the currently selected profile – when running PhoneWeaver, any other application, working on the home/applications screen and even when your phone is locked!

In addition to showing the currently selected profile, you will notice a small padlock icon showing on top of the icon when the currently selected profile was selected with the Lock option and the timeout hour, in case that the current profile was selected with a timeout value!

This way, you can always swiftly see what is the current selected profile, regardless to the current screen active on your Android phone!

Downloading PhoneWeaver

PhoneWeaver costs $6.99

To get PhoneWeaver, search for “PhoneWeaver” at the Android Market app.

Click here to visit the PhoneWeaver for Android page at our web-site for screenshots and more details