I bought my Motorola Droid the morning it was released to the public. The first app I installed on it was Locale, which promised to automatically set the phone’s volume, wifi settings, and so on, based on its current location. I thought this was a great idea: I could automatically silence my phone at the office, and turn the ringer on while at home. Unfortunately, after a couple days, I realized that Locale basically never updated my location, so it never worked right. I still stuck with Locale for a while, because it also allows you to set you phone’s volume (etc.) based on the time of day. After Locale became a $9.99 app, I uninstalled it in favor of a free alternative: Timeriffic.

Timeriffic allows you to change your phone’s volume (ringer and notifications), wifi, Bluetooth, screen brightness, and airplane mode, based on whatever day and time schedules you create. It is easy to set up (though the UI colors are kind of garish), stable (no force closes), and has almost no effect on battery life.

Timeriffic

I use Timeriffic to silence my phone while I am asleep. Typically, I don’t receive phone calls in the middle of the night, but I receive a lot of notifications, which I don’t want to wake me up. Silencing the ringer or notifications with Timeriffic is an all-or-nothing setting. The downside to Timeriffic, as opposed to Locale, is that you can’t “whitelist” phone numbers to ensure that certain people can reach you, even when you’re phone is set to silent. That isn’t a problem for me, but then again, I don’t have a job that requires me to be on call.

Locale has more features and a better user interface, but it is way too expensive, for what it is, to recommend. For my needs, the free Timeriffic is more than adequate.