[General Topics] Menneisyys:
UPDATE (11/23/2007): let me also elaborate on the quick / automatic band switching capabilities of phoneAlarm, as a lot of you may already have been using it.

The full (but NOT the lite!) version of phoneAlarm, the winner of this year’s Best Software Awards contest in the Multifunction Phone Utilities category, is also capable of quick band switching, both manual (doable via two clicks) and automatic. The latter depending on the time, power/sync state, Outlook Appointment or even location – see the config screen of the latter HERE, inside the Location Service, by default, disabled feature. See page 19 of the official documentation for more information on how this should be configured.

To do this, first, you have to modify the profiles to enable band switching (instead of the default “leave in its position”), click the Settings icon on the far right of the Today screen plug-in (on VGA sscreens; on QVGA ones, it’s in the second row) and, in the Profiles tab,

1.	select a pre-defined profile you’d like to assign the en/disabled 3G radio to. Note that you can always rename these profiles by clicking the icon . Then, you can assign a much more meaningful name to the profiles switching between the two modes; an example is HERE (renaming Home and Work). Note that if you do rename these profiles, you will need to switch to text mode with the “Profile menu as text (not graphic)” checkbox at the bottom so that the new labels are visible, not the old, icon-based ones

2.	scroll down to Data band in the Radio settings and select the profile you’d prefer. Do this for both profiles; an example of configuring the two (dis/enabled) states (note the profile names at the top!) can be seen in the following two screenshots:

Press OK and you’re all set.

3.	to manually switch, just click the leftmost icon on the Today screen and select the profile you’d like to activate:

Note that you can easily get rid of the other, listed profiles in the above-shown profile name / visibility settings dialog, by simply un-checking their checkboxes.

Finally, note that you can not only manually switch between these modes, but also automatically. The latter may be really useful when you, say, want to always have 3G between 10AM and 11AM. You can also define location-based criteria for band switching: for example, you may configure phoneAlarm to fall back to the battery-friendly GSM mode at home, opposed to work, where you can let it to go with full 3G bandwidth. All this can be based on several criteria; for example, the ID of the GSM / 3G tower at your workplace / at home (assuming they’re different because you’re not living in the close vicinity of your workplace).

phoneAlarm, on the other hand (as opposed to, CommMgrPro, the big bother of BandSwitch), doesn’t support pre-defined timeout for switching profiles. That is, you, say, upon switching to a 3G mode, you can’t configure phoneAlarm to switch back to GSM mode after predefined time. That is, relative timeouts can’t be defined. As opposed to absolute time – of course, you can always have phoneAlarm do the band switching at a pre-defined, absolute time. Not relatively to another time, though.)

Note that band switching, as opposed to the other tools I’ve introduced, isn’t necessarily done instantaneously (at least not on the HTC Universal and version v1.63 of phoneAlarm); only after a while, when a real connection is established. This can slow down accessing the web a little because of the band-switching and reconnection at starting to browse.

(Thanks to S.Christensen for initially pointing towards the new version of phoneAlarm!)