Gadgetory

hey everybody Josh here for Android Authority and I wanted to show y'all or really maybe review if y'all an oldie but a goodie that's been around since the very very beginning time of Android it's called locale I'll open it right up now what locale does is locale allows you to automate certain actions on your phone similar to something like Tasker or automated and it lets you set conditions in situations to do things like that so you'll see that I've got home and default are both active right now and then work is different and I'll just take you through how we actually create a situation this right here is support this question mark this Play Store bag with a puzzle piece on it takes you to the Play Store and to all of the locale plugins because there are many third-party plugins you can purchase and then tap into the power of locale with this this button right here lets you prioritize your situations which one takes priority over the other and then this menu button actually only lets you contact support you'll see up at the top we have an on/off switch just like you would see in the settings menu prefer profiles in Santa's and mater turning Wi-Fi on and off things like that so we'll start a new situation and from the very first time you hit add situation you are given a couple of options you can select from a template a silence your phone at night silence string meetings on your calendar or silent your ringer by turning the display face downs returning your phone over like that but if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty then you're going to want to start from scratch now I'll leave this untitled just because it's not going be one that I actually use but to start you need to add a condition and the condition can range from battery calendar caller location orientation and time now time is fairly straightforward it's a day of the week days of the week between a certain hour span of time orientation is if the phone the display is facing up like this or down like so location is one of the more powerful ones it actually taps into the phone's GPS and you can set certain conditions or certain I guess what's the term they use settings pardon me based off of where you're at where your one says you're at you can also do things like if a certain caller calls and they can have a certain ringtone or the phone can do something different calendar events and battery percentage so why don't we do battery and see what happens if it is plugged in now if it's unplugged and below 20% you hit the checkmark down here so battery below 20% my battery jumps below 20% what do I want to happen let's say logically and these are all the things that are built in and then I because I'm a desk SMS user that's a plug-in down at the bottom let's say logically if your battery is below 20% you would want to turn brightness down to 30% just like that your battery's below 20% let's just name this high for time sake and just like that it's saved now you'll see that home and default are still active default is what your phone does when none of the conditions are activated and because I have nothing on my defaults right now because I plan to do everything via conditions then that's why they're both active now you'll see that high is not active because right up here my battery is at 47% one thing that bugs me just a hair is that there is constantly a low-cal notification running and it tells you what conditions are actually active right now I have home and default running but if you try and swipe it away just because I like to have a really clean notification tray it doesn't let you and the explanation for this is that if it doesn't have something in the notification menu then Android will kill it as a process and then it can no longer continue to monitor your phone so just something that you'd have to deal with if you are going to use locale otherwise that's pretty much it it's very very powerful the more in-depth you get but I'm trying to keep this as brief as I possibly can locale is by 244 a.m. I believe is what they're called and it is $4.99 in the Google Play Store a long long time ago it was $9.99 and when it came out of being a free beta and so I never purchased it but now that I noticed that the price was slashed I think it's a great great investment especially if you don't want to have to worry about constantly turning on or off GPS Bluetooth Wi-Fi volumes things like that last time it is called locale and you can find it in the Google Play Store