I have always been pretty interested in the mobile telecom industry, so this exercise allows me to talk about a few problems I see in phone development and possible ways to fix them. I continue to encounter an interesting problem when I need to change my phone's ringer volume.
This task is made easy with the side volume rocker, however when I need to silence my phone once I am already in the quiet environment, I encounter my problem. I wince, knowing that as I lower the ringer volume, my phone will issue a tone at each level. It plays tones at the 6th, 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st volume level, I must simply do my best to cover the speakers of the phone with my hands while I quickly cycle through each volume level.
Additionally at this time, I do not wish to receive calls, so the phone could feasibly be off. People hate to interface with their phone to turn it off, however, because of the tones, and the time involved in switching it on again. This problem could ideally be overcome with a sleep feature of some sort. Incoming Calls would go straight to voicemail, informing callers you were temporarily unavailable. When the user leavers sleep mode, they will be notified of all missed call/text messages. The social-technical gap of quickly and quietly entering this mode is still an issue.
I propose a modern gesture-control system utilizing accelerometers already built into most phone. Ideally, users could shake their phones to enter/exit sleep mode. It wouldn't make a noise when it turns off or on, and you could switch by shaking it up and down two times. This one easily implemented feature fixes two different problems and does so in an easy and user friendly control method.
This feature could also help with power management. The phone could be powered down as much as possible, so long as it doesn't take a long time to switch back on. This feature even performs a third function, extending battery life. I think this one simple feature could significantly increase the usability of any phone.
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That is a pretty sweet idea! To think about it, I always found it annoying to hear a tone as I try to make the phone silent. Is sleep mode the same thing as turning the phone off? Then, I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say the shake mode with help with power management. Does it mean that the shaking takes less time to turn the phone off, and thus saves power? Also, as innovative as this idea sounds, there needs to be a way to differentiate whether the phone is shaken intentionally or accidentally. If a person runs around with the phone, maybe the sleep mode would be triggered. But overall, it's a brilliant idea.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea for a sleep feature for the phone, it would definitely help with the social technical gap that arises from the fact that you're trying to make your phone quieter but it's being loud in the process. It's very counter-intuitive to have the thing your trying to prevent (not disturb people or be rude because of noises from your phone) happen while you're preventing it.
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