Location-Based Reminders for Android

Recently, I was headed to an appointment. My wife asked that I stop at the grocers on my way back. I thought to myself, “It would sure be nice if there was an app that would pop-up a reminder based on my leaving or arriving at a location.” When I got home later that day, I did a search for “location based reminder” and found three potential candidates.

The first two (GeoNote and RemindThat) are very similar. You set a location that you want, set the reminder text that you want to display, and you’re ready to go. That’s the essence of it. GeoNote has several more features as shown in the list below. (The “G” column is for GeoNote, the R column for RemindThat.)

G	R	Feature
X		Select either cellular network or GPS for resolving location.
X		1-button to disable service.
X	X	Set parameter of notification area.
X	X	Choose location by touching on map.
X	X	Choose location by manually inputting address.
X		Choose location by selecting option “current location.”
X	X	User-selectable sound notification.
X	X	Choose vibrate notification.
X	X	Set repeating reminder intervals.
X		Set off-peak hours (saves battery).
X	(Arrive only)	Choose to be reminded when leaving and/or arriving at location.
X	X	Delete note/location with long-press.
	X	View map of currently set reminders.

As shown, the only feature RemindThat has that GeoNote does not is the ability to view the map of currently set reminders. However, you can merely view the list of those reminders. The review of both these products is of the free version. GeoNote has  a paid version that, according to its own notes, does nothing more than remove the ads. One final observation about RemindThat--It generated a “forced close” error while my phone (a Samsung Infuse) was in stand-by mode (sleeping).

If you find other features that you feel deserve mention, I'd be glad to revise my list. Admittedly, I only spent about an hour reviewing and "playing" with these apps. However, based on the features and performance, I would sooner recommend GeoNote over RemindThat.

Now moving onto the last app. It is a bit different in that its purpose is slightly different. The feature it offers can be done with the other two but for me it is nice to keep these types of notifications separate. The app is near2there. Its premise is that you may have a number of places you would like to visit sometime in the indefinite future. You may not have any particular plans to go there, but if you ever happen to be near that point-of-interest, you'd like to be reminded about it. For example, there is a restaurant I've been wanting to visit. Its only 30 miles away but it is a bit pricey and having been out of work for 9 months now, I'm not about to go there at this time. Nonetheless, I would like to keep it on my wish list.

That is where near2there comes in. You can set the reminder so that the next time you are in that area, it will pop-up a reminder message. You can either act on it or not.