Top 5 Features Your Cellphone Should Already Have

RickM — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:33:00 GMT

Why is innovation dead in the cell phone industry?
This is a list of five innovations I would like to see cell phone manufacturers and service providers bring to market.

1) Timed Silent Mode

How many times has this happened to you:
You go into a movie and like any polite movie goer you put your phone on silent. Then you completely forget about it. A few days later you start wondering why none of your friends have called and start feeling like a social outcast but wait... your cell phone has been on silent the whole time. This is such a simple feature I can not think of any excuse for it not to be on all cell phones.

2) Server-Side Text Message Storage

Shouldn't the 10 cents per message get you something? I mean really, I feel like a little part of me dies every time I pay the cell phone company for the privilege of sending a miniscule bit of text over their network. Also, it's such a tiny bit of data; do we really need to lose it all every time we get a new phone? Also, I know two separate people who have run out of text message space on their phones. This is just ridiculous. Can't they at least use some kind of compressed format? Just keeping the messages stored for you would completely solve this issue. I would even be willing to navigate some kind of web interface to get at them.

3) Accessible cell network APIs.

Are cell phone networks really so exploitable that we should not have access to the guts of our phones? Imagine the kind of awesome innovation could happen by GPLing your phone software and letting programmers have at it. Even a phone with very basic functionality would be wildly popular if people could write their own core applications or operating systems. The free R&D benefit would also be phenomenal. You might see anything from more efficient algorithms for cell tower switching and power management to innovative new interfaces. I wonder if it would be possible to write something that could use tower triangulation to determine your location without having a GPS receiver. The possibilities are limitless.

4) Social Network Integration

How cool would it be if you could just download all of your friend’s phone numbers off of Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn and just have them show up in your phone? I can see some people saying this would cause phone number overload but that is only because cell phones have such abysmal contact categorization. What if they were placed in easy to navigate categories based on where they came from? Now you might ask, what about privacy? Well, the networks themselves could implement controls to limit who gets your contact information. Imagine being able to have your cell phone automatically have all your business contacts. Now imagine you were the social network site that people had to be a part of to be in everyone’s cell phone business contacts automatically. You could even add a search feature to find people in a certain industry or area quickly. Effectively managing your contacts would suddenly become extremely simple. It’s a huge win for everyone involved.

5) Inter-network Real Time Chat

While text messaging is a good start it has a lot of big problems. We get charged an obscene amount of money to transfer a tiny bit of information. There is no guarantee that the message will actually get to the destination and there is no way to tell. There is a long delay between when the message is sent and when it is received on the other end. Living in the modern day internet age these limitations seem absolutely ridiculous. If the cell networks can support real time audio streams (phone conversations) why can’t they support real time text? The reality of the situation is that the phone companies would rather nickel and dime us with text messages than give us a decent service. Ideally, phone chat would sport these features:

-Fast enough to carry on a conversation without huge misunderstandings developing due to badly timed messages.
-User Status to tell people if you want to be bothered or not.
-Message storage so we can catch up when were in a no service area or our phone dies.
-Supported by the majority of new phones by the majority of carriers.
-Group Chat (Chat Rooms)
-Inline picture uploading would be a nice touch.
-Some internetwork communication would be nice too (MSN, AIM.. etc).

T-Mobile comes close to this ideal with their AIM friendly phones but, unfortunately, there are some major issues with their service. I had a T-Mobile sidekick for a few months and it suffered from two major problems: T-Mobile has mind blowingly awful coverage areas. And not everyone has a sidekick and/or AIM.

This may seem like a lot to ask for. However, I think the majority of people would pay five or even ten bucks a month to be able to chat with their friends at any time. The network load incurred by sending a small amount of text would be insignificant.

What features do you think cell phones are missing?

Rick Minerich's Development Wonderland : ideas, lists

Top 5 Features Your Cellphone Should Already Have