Do you remember Smart Actions for the Motorola RAZR? It’s similar to Tasker, a popular Android application, allowing you to automate tasks on your phone, based on defined rules, settings, and even location. Motorola boasted that their Smart Actions have the potential to increase your battery life up to 30%.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrAndZ-6Dio&feature=colike
Google has been extremely quite about a patent that they filed back in September, 2011. The patent covers Google obtaining network information and GPS information to see where you and your phone are. Then, using that information to perform certain tasks.
So what exactly are Smart Actions, location-based settings, how can they improve your battery life and more importantly, why do you want them? Maybe when you’re at work, you don’t have GPS service. To save battery, you could program an application to turn off your GPS radio while you’re at work automatically. Or maybe while you’re at home, you enable your WiFi radio, which you disabled during your commute from work. When you get home, you’ll want that turned on, so you don’t have to waste your expensive mobile data plan, so you create a task to do so. There are many, many different use cases besides battery saving techniques. Maybe you want to send a text message to your significant other when you leave work, to let them know that you’re on your way home. Or maybe while you’re in the car, it could enable your phone’s Bluetooth radio or launch Google Play Music automatically.
These are just some examples of Smart Actions or Tasker configurations. We don’t know what or how Google plans on using this patent. However, it does excite us with the recent launch of on{x} a location-based phone automation service from Microsoft, which requires you sign into Facebook to even use the application. For those of us that eat and sleep Google, it will be nice to have similar functionality in a Google native application.
Source: Phandroid