Friday, August 3, 2007

Wildcard Caller ID idea


Hi Experts,
I'm back with an idea of a little neat feature for Symbian (and possibly others) cell phones.
The idea is simple - to make user's life easier by recognizing (via Caller ID) groups of numbers matching a wildcard, not just the whole exact number of a Contact. Let me show you how.
You have Contacts in your cellphone's Address book. The phone matches the incoming CLI (Caller Line ID) of the caller to a number in the Contacts. But what if you want to identify a group of numbers?
This could be useful, for instance, to quickly see from which network (or city) you are being called, or from which company. It's no secret that many companies get pools of consecutive telephone numbers, so you could be quickly seeing from which company you get the call even without filling your Address Book with all employees' numbers.
Business customers may be interested in this feature. It would be a beneficial, value-adding feature for a platform, and a marketing differentiator, to provide a new type of contacts in the phone's address book - a template (wildcard) contact.

Usage example 1: Let's say I have the following entries:
+74955556666 Lena (BeeLine), +16457236546 John, +791687458755 Lena (MTS).

What if I could enter Address Book records like
+7916* MTS, +1* USA, +7903* BeeLine, +749512388## Forbes, +7812* St.Petersburg ?

Like in UNIX wildcards,
* (star) stands here for any number of any digits, # (mesh) stands for any single digit.

Usage Example 2:

I was 'phone-abused' by a real estate agency in Moscow - they have lots of employees in many offices, calling in from their office phones, all from the same pool +7495363####. I wasted lots of time answering their calls, telling them I "wrong number" and so on. They seem to have had wrong number of a client written down. Had I had this template contacts feature in my phone, I would have not need to squinch my eyes trying to see first digits and decide if I need to pick up.

Usage Example 3.

When late at night someone calls you from abroad on an important mission, it would be nice to see it's from another country (a word "Germany" shown) instead of trying to wake up and see if the first digits are +49.

Sounds good? Might be even better! (options)

"Exact match" means the current way of doing things - all numbers match.
"Wildcard match" means the new, group match.

A cellphone shows not only the exact match, but also the next worst match from a wildcard entries. And it could even highlight the part of incoming number that matches a wildcard, with a different color!

This gives a user, at a quick glance, a good idea of who might call, or where from, without the annoying deciphering of the caller ID by himself. If there's no exact match, the call history shows just the full number. If there's an exact match, and a worse match, the call history logs
the 2 longest matches. 

Please tell me what you think.

4 comments:

Edwin said...

Hi, I like that idea a lot! I also read your RAZR piece. Hopefully these type of ideas get spread around and people in the design departments pick them up.

Anonymous said...

A really, really great idea. I'm looking for something like that as well.

I get calls from all over the world regulary. I can't always remember the area code. If I get a phone call from a phone number not in my contacts I would like the phone to display the country.
Eg from +86 display China.

Makes screening easier.

Your suggestion would solve my problem as well.

To bad nobody has given you any suggestions.

Anonymous said...

a verry interesting story/idea, hopefully one of sw housses will make this

Sergey Zak said...

Here's an update: webOS phones have this feature!
I have bought an hp Pre3 and I like it.
Thank you Palm/hp.