Mr. Silent: turn on silent mode automatically on Android

If you are the type of person who enables silent mode, either vibration or complete silence, on your phone usually when you get out or to specific places and locations such as work, the cinema or a crowded restaurant, you may want to use automation instead to avoid situations where you forget to silence your phone.

While some smartphone owners do not seem to have issues with it, some even seem to embrace loud phone conversations or music that plays so loud that everyone around hears it as well, it may be an unpleasant experience for others.

I fall into the second group of users, as I dislike it a lot when my smartphone starts to play a ringtone or music suddenly while I'm in public.

Mr. Silent is a new application for Android that you can use to create rules when you want your phone to be silenced by it.

The application features four different options in this regard:

• Time Slot - Configure the app to silence the phone once or regularly by specifying time and date in the app. You can silence your phone each night when you go to bed, silence it for an event that is about to happen such as going to the cinema or meeting friends at a bar, or during your commute to work.
• Events - This is similar to the time slot feature, but limited to events. This may include meetings or other events picked up by your phone's calendar.
• Contacts - This feature enables you to blacklist contacts. When a contact that is on the blacklist calls, your phone will go silent automatically.
• Locations - Add latitude and longitude of locations to turn your phone silent whenever you reach a selected radius. This can be useful to silence your phone when you arrive at work for example.

The rules are easy to setup with the location-based rules probably the most time consuming of them all. You can display a map in the application to pick a place this way so that you don't have to look up latitude and longitude using a different application.

The feature that I like the most is the time-based rule option. I can turn my phone silent at night, and also at specific hours of a work week, for instance when I'm out of house.

You can swipe to the right to display settings and all configured rules. Settings include an option to switch between silent mode and vibrate, and the location update interval (every 30 seconds by default).

Conclusion

Mr. Silent is a neat application for Android 2.2 and up. It requires quite a few rights though which seem -- at least for the most part -- necessary for its functionality.