AHS Concierge
by Toni McQuilken
May 12, 2011 2:30 PM –
Install
AHS Concierge. The missing feature of the Android launcher: Automatic home screen shortcuts management! With AHS Concierge, you just use your phone and let our learning algorithm detect what should be on your home screen. You won’t have to look around and search for an app anymore! AHS Concierge monitor your day-to-day activities and detect various tasks you’re doing in 4 different period of the day: morning, afternoon, evening and night. It will analyze what applications you’re using the most, what person you’re calling or texting and what website you visit more often and create shortcuts to help you get more productive!
Price: ~$1.04
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- It learns your patterns to set up shortcuts based on the apps, shortcuts and contacts you frequently use
Cons
- Drains battery life
- Settings don’t always stay set
- You can’t set a specific home screen as the default to sync with – it will try to sync it with whatever screen you were last on
Features:
This app is an automation tool that will learn your patterns of usage, and automatically populate your home screen with the shortcuts to the apps, contacts and bookmarks you frequently use. In the settings, you can decide the usage thresholds (how many times you have to use an app before it will put it on the homescreen), how many shortcuts it will manage per time period, and several other settings.
I found that it has promise, but I wasn’t thrilled with the drain on battery life that I experienced while it was running the background to learn my patterns. I also found that it tended to want to put the shortcuts on whichever home screen I happened to be on at the time, rather than letting me designate a specific screen in the settings to populate. I was also confused over how it determined usage. In some cases, apps I had only opened once were showing up in the stats as being used multiple times, while others, that I use daily, were only showing that they had been used once. So I’m not certain if the algorithm was just off, or if I was somehow doing something wrong.
There was no FAQ to walk me through what all of the settings do, so I found myself going online to learn more about the app to try and get better results – so it might just be lack of good tutorial showing you how to use the various settings that caused the problems I had.
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AHS Settings
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AHS Settings 3
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AHS Settings 2
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AHS Shortcuts
Usefulness:
If you’re looking for a way to automate what’s on your home screen at any given time during the day, then this is something you’ll have running in the background constantly.
Ease of Use:
There are a lot of setting in this app, but unfortunately not a lot of explanations of what they do. So it’s a lot of trial and error, or going online and searching for instructions on how to use them to their fullest. Once you do get it set, however, you don’t need to fiddle with it again.
Frequently Used:
This is an app that will run in the background on a regular basis.
Interface:
Again, there is a lot of information packed into just a few screens, with sliders to adjust settings. I did find that just scrolling down to the bottom of the page at times would activate a slider on one of the settings, and I would have to reset that particular variable again, which was frustrating. But overall, if you overlook the lack of a help section to explain what everything does and how to use it, it’s actually laid out well and is very usable.