Nokia Bots is a new experimental project from Nokia's department of mad science, also known as The Beta Labs. The idea is this - a collection of little programs, or 'bots' that live on your phone and monitor how you use it. Do they work, well there was only one way to find out and that was to put Nokia Bots to the test. Read our Nokia Bots review to see if we've gone batty about bots or not...
The Bots spend a while learning about your phone usage, then start to help you out by making suggestions or just doing stuff that they think you might like. Yes, it does sound both a little bit creepy and a lot like Clippy, the Microsoft Office paperclip assistant. How does it work in practise? There are currently four Bots (more are planned, depending on how the beta works out) : Profile Bot, Battery Bot, Alarm Bot and Shortcut Bot. These live in two widget panels on your home screen - one for Shortcut Bot and one for all the others.
Shortcut Bot is probably the most immediately useful. It just keep an eye on the apps that you use and fills its panel with easy-access icons for the most common ones. The Bot is clever enough to know if you already have a shortcut for an app on the home screen and we found it really handy - particularly when it popped up a shortcut to our wifi settings during a day of particularly dodgy connectivity.
The other Bot panel shows icons with little progress bars next to them to show that the Bot is learning. When a Bot has enough data to work with the progress bar completes and turns green and the Bot does its thing.
Alarm Bot will suggest alarms for you based on previous usage. e.g. you might get a suggestion of 'Alarm 7:30?' before you go to bed, if that is when you have been setting alarms earlier in the week. It will also offer to switch your phone to silent for the night, which is a nice touch.
We weren't able to get any joy from Profile Bot - we just don't switch profiles that often. Actually, we did make an effort to switch for things like tube journeys and even made up a couple of meetings, but the bot is still 'learning'.
Battery Bot monitors battery use and will apparently let you know if you need to charge your phone before you go to bed. Our copy did its learning phase pretty quickly, but is still to suggest anything to us despite us letting the phone battery drop down to a single pip on several evenings.
This does illustrate the main problem with Nokia Bots - you never really know what they are doing or even if they are doing anything at all. The Bots concept is a good one, and certainly the Shortcut Bot has been very useful. It would be good to get more feedback in later version, though, and maybe to be able to tweak some settings rather than have the Bots behave like a black box.
Details
Price: Free
Size: 0.174 MB
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