It would be great if cell phones would automatically set themselves to vibrate in movie theaters, plays, symphonies, lecture halls, etc.

To achieve this will require cell phone manfactures to agree on and implement a "public local" messaging protocol -- perhaps using next generation Bluetooth (that supports multicast).

Here's how it might work:

(1) Before the movie starts, a local transceiver in the theater broadcasts a Bluetooth packet to all of the cell phones in the room that tells them to "save your current ringer state and then switch to vibrate for the next N minutes".

(2) After N minutes, the phone would switch back to the previous, saved ringer state.

Issues to work through:

- What if a person comes late to the movie and his/her cell phone misses the initial packet? Perhaps this could be solved by resending the packet every minute for the first 15 minutes of the movie, and then every 5 minutes thereafter. The protocol should have some way of identifying these as "resend requests" and the phones should be smart enough to ignore them appropriately.

- Could this be abused by malicious parties to mess with the state of your phone? The packet should be digitally signed so that the source of the packet can't be spoofed. The first time you receive a message from a source, your phone would vibrate and a message on the screen would say something like:

Landmark Theaters would like to automatically switch your phone to vibrate for the length of this film.

( Ignore this request )

( Ignore this and all future "Switch to Vibrate" requests from Landmark Theaters )

( Accept this request )

( Accept this and all future "Switch to Vibrate" requests from Landmark Theaters )

- The range problem. This is the thorniest issue to work through. Different phones will have different Bluetooth antenna sensitivity, so choosing the correct amount of power in the theater's transceiver to cover just the phones in the theater and not the phones in the adjacent theater's will be difficult. Perhaps Bluetooth's difficulty passing through walls can actually be an advantage here.

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