Microsoft Patents “Inconspicuous Mode” For Mobile Phones

Entering into the cinema you would probably either turn your phone to silent mode or airplane mode if you’d rather not be reached at all. The same can be done when you’re going to sleep where you put your phone to do not disturb mode so that after a certain time in the night, your phone will automatically be put on silent.

However what if there was a smarter way to go about this? The good news is that Microsoft appears to have thought of something. The Redmond company has recently filed for a patent for a feature called “inconspicuous mode”. With this mode, the phone is smart enough to detect your whereabouts and adjust it accordingly, such as dimming the brightness, muting audio, and so on.

So how does this work? Well the feature can detect your location based on GPS, NFC, or even the WiFi MAC address. In fact it goes one step further by syncing with your calendar events. For example if you have a meeting set for a certain day at a certain time, your phone could enter inconspicuous mode by itself.

There are launchers that already offer contextual information depending on your location, but presumably this feature will be headed for Windows Phone handsets. Of course given that this is a patent, there’s really no telling if it will ever be made a reality, but hopefully it will as it does sound pretty handy.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Microsoft