Brian's Blog

More phone features

2008-06-15T16:21:00.000-07:00

So here are a few more phone wishlist items.

1) Call grabbing

It's really common for me to be in my cube and want to be able to move into a conference room. Unfortunately, moving into a different room is a many step process that often involves finding out that you have a wrong number. How about being able to put your mobile next to your landline and performing an action (e.g. pushing a button on the land line) that "grabs" the call. Once you find a CR, you need only give it to the new phone and contibue your conversation.

2) Room location sensors.

Rooms would have sensors that mobile devices could communicate with to tell their location. Setting could suggest ring volumes and vibrate options, or the user could set them himself. Initially I thought that RFID might be one way to do this, but it seems like integrating the scanner into the phone would be expensive an consume too much power.

3) variable vibrate alert intensity.

Based on some factors (e.g temperate and movement) vibrate alerts could increase in strength. I find that when walking in loose pants I can miss a call. A low temperature (indicating that a phone isn't very close to your body) and a shaking phone (indicating movment) would lead to a larger vibration.

Now that the cat's more or less out of the bag.

2008-06-15T16:14:00.000-07:00

I guess we get to see if humans are truly evil or not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/world/asia/15nuke.html?hp

Not that nuclear technology being leaked is anything new, but it does seem like it's becoming fairly ubiquitous among larger nations.

A Good Phone, not a crappy camera or web browser

2008-04-22T17:57:00.000-07:00

I've had a cell phone for about 10 years now. While my current phone is considerably smaller than my first one, it really isn't all that much better.

I had a generic Motorolla clamshell, but the design was so depressingly bad, I ditched it for a Nokia 6015i off ebay for $50. It lacks some of the must have features, but it works and it's pretty tough. Still, I feel like like it could be much more useful, though some features would require a pretty heavy infrastructure redesign.

We'll start with a list things we put up with which seem unacceptable:

1) Suddenly dropped calls
Cell tower placement can only be so dense, especially in certain areas. When you've lost signal for several seconds, it makes sense that the tower will give up on you, but what seems unacceptable is when your call gets dropped for no apparent reason.

2) No call recovery
OK, so you went into your bomb shelter in the basement to get some canned peaches while you were gabbing, and you lose you signal. Why do I need to re-dial? It's stupid. Even internet connections don't work this way. Ideally the other end of the call would get a notice that the call was lost, and allow them to hang on.

3) No simple way to download and upload contacts
This should be able to be done on a web page that can export to a textfile.

4) Have to use phone to configure
Why can't configurations be done by a web page as well?

5) Poor Voice mail integration
Visual Voice Mail is a nice start. Using voice recognition for transcription would be better.

6) Ability to use VOIP when in WIFI range
It's no mystery why this is the case, but being able to switch back and forth when necessary would be a great feature.

7) Poor voice quality
Most phones seem really stingy on their bandwidth. It seems like having extra bandwidth that willgracefully degrade would be a good feature.

8) Reliable voice send mode
There are some situations when you want to give a clear message to whoever's on the other end. Emergencies that arise in spotty reception areas, and leaving voice mail with detailed information are another. A solution to this would be like an SMS like voice message where the sound is recorded and played (potentially with some delay) on the other end. To use this generally would require some major changes to the the telephone system, but to integrate this with most voicemail system ought not to be too difficult.

9) Indestructible
My Nokia is pretty tough, but it's keyboard is flakey and won't stand up to water. A waterproof metal case with high quality buttons would be nice. Something that works like this would be a start.

Sadly because of the incestuous relationship between device makers and providers, I don't see a lot of these features getting implemented any time soon.

I'm not fired

2008-04-19T07:41:00.000-07:00

So the layoffs came through and I'm not fired. That's nice.