Call Confirmation
Posted 30 December 2006 under gadgets, technology
While trying to make plans with some friends this evening, I accidentally dialed an acquaintance from college with whom I haven’t spoken in at least two years. I think I was able to hang up in time to avoid the dreaded “missed call” message, but I got to thinking (on my winter vacation, no less) and I’ve devised a solution to this potentially embarrassing problem. It would work something like this:
Under the phone settings menu would be an option called “call confirmation”, which defaults to “off”. Other values include “one week”, “one month”, “six months”, and “one year”. Whenever you pick someone in your contacts list and hit the call button, the phone checks if call confirmation is enabled, and if so, retrieves the date of the last call placed to the person. If the last call was placed outside of the specified window (for example, you have call confirmation set to six months, and you last dialed the person eight months ago), a dialog window is displayed asking if you really intended to call the person. Hit yes, and you won’t be bothered again, but I’d wager that the vast majority of calls placed to contacts that haven’t been called in over a year are accidental.
I can’t imagine that this idea would be very difficult to implement from a software perspective, and saving the call information doesn’t seem like it would be terribly storage-intensive. That said, I have no idea how to promote an idea like this. Last I checked, my local Sprint store doesn’t have a suggestion box. Maybe I should investigate alternate firmware? I guess I’ll just put it up on the internets and hope for the best.
One last thing
Since this is undoubtedly my final post of the year, best wishes to you and yours, and here’s to a pleasant oh-seven.