Mobile Phone Capabilities
As I sat in church this morning, listening to a visiting speaker discuss Islam and Christianity, a delightful tone rang through my ears. It was my mobile, and as quickly as I heard it, I was reaching through my pocket jamming any button I could to silence it.It was then I realized there are many features missing from our mobile service, even though we’ve come to expect such features in our Instant messaging and calendaring services.For starters, when making calls, we have no idea what the recipient is doing. I’m not suggesting we should attempt telepathy, but giving users the ability to set their status (”I’m Available”, “I’m away, I’ll call you back”, “I’m sleeping”, etc.) could help when people call in. If, for instance, someone marks themselves as “I’m sleeping” either a text-to-speech or pre-recorded message will alert the caller before the phone is actually rung. This may impede the caller, but if I could be told that someone was say, at church, it would be great to be able to cancel the call or send a message straight to voice mail.Taking that idea further, why not allow iCalendar-based calendars to be linked with the phones, so if there is a preset calendar item, the user’s status could be based off of that! (This coming from my experience this morning; my Google Calendar said I was at church!)Along the lines of notifications, I don’t entirely understand why callers aren’t given the ability to set call priorities or choose to send calls straight to silent or vibrate mode. Yes, telemarketers could abuse the priorities and set theirs to high, but users could decide to only allow priorities to be set by people in their immediate calling plan or in a user-defined list.Essentially, this is a small list, but I constantly think of little things that bug me that do not appear to be phone-specific, but rather service-wide. The iPhone is sure to add some brilliant functionailty, but I’m unaware of the abilities I’ve listed to be included.And lastly, usability and design experts may say adding this kind of functionality would only confuse the end-user, but I would argue that any well design phone and phone system could setup default values that make the experience for every new user the same or better than it is today.