Cellphones are a necessary evil. That’s the position I adopted after reading it somewhere. I believe it’s true – these days you really can’t get along without a cellphone. Believe me, I tried. I went on as long as I could, which was until I got a car. One of the ways cellphones changed the way we behave is that today it’s nearly impossible to pre-set a time and a place to meet someone. Remember the time when, if you wanted to arrange to meet a friend, you had to decide together on a time and a place? Seems like ages ago. These days it’s always “call me to see if we can meet”.
While this may be considered a good effect of cellphone adoption (I’m not always sure it’s good, but I digress), cellphones can be very intrusive. If you’re in a meeting, watching a movie or sleeping – people can get to you any time. If you don’t want to be interrupted you can always silence the phone or turn it off. Still, I need a mode in between – a mode that, if someone calls once, doesn’t light up, vibrate or ring unless the same person calls again immediately – then the phone should come back to life and do whatever the current mode instructs it to do (ring, vibrate, whatever).
Currently I “emulate” this when I’m in meetings. If a call comes in and I think the person may need me right now I send back an SMS saying “call again if urgent”. This can be part of the implementation of the call-again-if-urgent mode. I wonder if current smartphone software allows such control and if it can be implemented today. The best thing would be if the network supported it and so, assuming you urgently need someone, your cellphone will tell you that the callee set the call-again-if-urgent mode and ask you if you would like to bother him/her.
Great idea, maybe you should consider android (or even better, j2me – because my phone supports it) implementation :)
Thanks.
Maybe I can submit it to the Android Developer Challenge:
http://code.google.com/android/adc.html
The winners will probably be “cool” applications, but it’ll be nice to participate
Great idea.
Any success?
Android opened their app store to charge money for apps.
Thanks… actually, I tried looking at Android APIs but couldn’t find a way to hook into the incoming call notification the way I wanted to. But that was a long time ago and I didn’t ask the people in the forums, who would have probably provided the answer. I might give it another shot sometime soon.
Another thing is that Google is now opening Google Voice, which consolidates all your phones. It can probably implement a feature like this as well.