Lack of innovation in mobile phone services

[andrewducker]

My mobile phone is vastly improved over the first one I ever had.  It can do things that make the original phone look like something out of an archeological dig.

So why is it that the services my phone company provide along with it are still so basic?

There's something I've wanted for _years_.  When I go to bed I want to tell them that.  And then, when someone calls for me they should be told "Andrew Ducker is asleep.  Press 1 to leave a message, or if it's urgent then press 2 to wake him."

If my answerphone services were provided by a third party, and there was serious competition in this arena, then I'm sure that I'd already have this as an option.  But because the services that are provided are all subservient to "you can have x minutes, y texts and z MB for n pounds per month" you don't see any innovation outside of the actual phones.

Comments

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

But shouldn't that sort of innovation be stuck inside the phone anyway? If your phone is off, they go to voicemail. Otherwise, your phone becomes your voicemail secretary for all intents and purposes, immediately listening to, and setting to be archived, all of your voicemail, which is then available for listening directly from the phone.

Then, anytime someone calls you, your phone knows that you're asleep, gives out the blurb, and either sends the person to your voicemail (which it backs up with the server after the message is complete) or wakes you up.

[andrewducker]

This would, of course, leave me with two different sets of answerphone messages...

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, that's what I meant about your phone turning into a secretary. Think the gmail equivalent of a voicemail service, where your phone constantly grabs and archives stuff, and then resyncs anytime it has connection to the server.

[andrewducker]

Well, yes, that would be lovely. I can't see them doing that soon though. For a start, there seems to be standardisation amongst companies about how to handle answerphone messages - so the new way of working would need to be part of the 4G standard.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

It could be done on the iPhone (if Apple wrote the software or someone bothered to jailbreak it and write the software). As the 'visual voicemail' means the iPhone knows which answerphone messages are sitting on a server belonging to the phone company it could display a merged view.

[andrewducker]

I wonder if it's in the standard spec, in that case, it's just not used by most phone manufacturers.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I got the impression that 'visual voicemail' was iPhone specific. ICBW though.

[edit: Yes it does exist for other phones]

[pennski.livejournal.com]

How many people are going to leave you a message if they have the option of waking you up :)
Especially if it's after *they've* got up in the morning?

[andrewducker]

See, that turns it into a social problem, of the "shouting at people should solve this" variety :->

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

Look at the business services from your phone company. Orange and Vodafone def offer this at a price. Orange also had the marvelous AI that was Wildfire which they killed off in 2005.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Said service should also recognise that the remote phone has been actively turned off, and say "Andrew Ducker has decided that no matter who the hell you are, he's not going to answer his phone. There's no point in even asking you to leave a voicemail, as he won't get back to you."

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

You could amend your standard telephone message to include your mobile number for urgent calls, then leave that on you bedside table.

[andrewducker]

My standard telephone message is on my mobile. Nobody calls me on my landline.

[martling.livejournal.com]

Deep within phone menus, you can usually select the number to which calls are forwarded if your phone is off or if you deliberately reject a call - indeed I think I have seen these as separate settings.

So the support is there for innovation in third party voicemail, I think.

[andrewducker]

Yup - it seems to send that information to the server, so I always assumed that this was built into the GSM standard.

*googles*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_services#Routing_the_call

So what I'm talking about would need an extension to the standard in order to be universal - but it could be implemented as an extension by my provider, they just wouldn't be able to control it via the normal phone menus.

[martling.livejournal.com]

Why do you need an extension to the standard? If there was a service that provided this functionality, you could activate it when going to bed by setting the CFU number to forward calls to that service.

Of course, you'd want that change to be a simple toggle in the UI, and there are issues there about the phone OSes and what third party apps can do, but that's separate to the GSM standard.

[andrewducker]

In your scenario I forward my calls to a different provider (let's call them "SleepyTime" when I go to bed. The incoming call hits my service provider (Orange), gets forwarded onto SleepyTime. They ask the caller if they want to wake me.

If they do want to wake me then how does the call get to my mobile? All calls to it are being rerouted...

If they don't want to wake me then how do they leave a message? There's no way for them to access my voicemail...

[martling.livejournal.com]

Wait. Duh. The service then can't forward the call on to your phone, because it will forward it right back.

You can still do it, though. There are three more forwarding settings after the CFU: No answer (with configurable timeout), Unavailable, and Busy.

So you set the "no answer" forward to the service with minimum timeout, make the default ring silent, and then use caller-specific ringtone settings to still ring on calls from the forwarding service.

Alternatively, you could just set the CFU to the forwarding service permanently. You could then update its "I'm asleep" flag over the net whenever you wanted - you can probably think of several cool ways to automate this. When you weren't asleep, it could just forward calls straight through.

That gets into a whole realm of call charging and caller ID issues though, which may or may not be soluble by a third party voicemail developer.

[martling.livejournal.com]

Wait, that second idea has the same problem.

I'm really not awake yet. Going to go make a cup of tea...

[martling.livejournal.com]

Final thought: actually, your provider could implement it without changes to the phone UI or GSM standard. They are the ones keeping the CFU setting, so they can bypass it when someone wants to wake you.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. If Orange provided this service it would work perfectly.

But there's no competition in the call-features space, so it's unlikely to happen soon.