Blog the globe recently pos­ted hypo­thet­ic­ally about Apple and Google col­laber­at­ing to allow geo­graphic inform­a­tion place­ment for read­ing with port­able devices. That idea, while cool, would not con­vince me to part with my hard earned cash. What would? Read on.

In my day to day life I occupy (or pass through) a fairly lim­ited num­ber of places: there’s my flat, my off­fice, the train line between the two, the gym and a bit of walk­ing to link them all up. That’s pretty much it. I also have pretty dif­fer­ent require­ments of my gad­getry depend­ing on where I am: in the office I want my phone on mute my mp3 player play­ing coding-​​music at low volume and my PDA to play alarms aud­ibly (so don’t miss meet­ings). While I’m walk­ing through town, I want my PDA to go quiet; there’s no point in advert­ising it, since I also want my mp3 player to switch to more ener­getic music and turn the volume up to nix the traffic noise so I won’t hear alarms any­way. At home, I don’t care about the mp3 player because I have a hi-​​fi, but I want all my alarms at top volume, because they stand a good chance of being in another room. You get the idea: simple changes in con­fig­ur­a­tion based on where I am. It’s an obvi­ous fea­ture, and is some­thing I’ve been want­ing to see for a long time. I know some phones can do this based on what cell they’re cur­rently con­nec­ted to, but mine can’t.

With my fin­ger in the air, I reckon approach­ing 40% of my gad­get inter­ac­tions are me manu­ally switch­ing them from one mode/​volume/​playlist to another, to bet­ter suit the envir­on­ment in a com­pletely pre­dict­able and repet­it­ive way. If those gad­gets are going to have GPS receiv­ers in them, then the first thing I want them to do is auto­mate that for me. We can talk about rich, geo­graphic con­tent deliv­ery once that’s working.