It's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function. If you don't want that, wouldn't a pad be a better option than a phone?
Besides, how would you handle calls from landlines and such?
Direct to voicemail, of course, with a message saying 'text me' for automatic transcription. As they say, its a feature not a bug [to not be interrupted]. In a perfect world I'd have a secretary or AI to screen calls on my behalf, but I don't.
Now that I think of it, I might actually try this the next time a telemarketer calls.
----
[0] - I haven't actually tested it, nor seen it in action - just saw it being mentioned when I reviewed "Tips" app after update.
Android tablets? Several.
There are some, but none of them would be suitable for consumer use.
I stand corrected!
Yes, it's primarily a phone by market segmentation. But it's a small tablet by features.
1) Do they make devices that aren't phones that are the size of a note"pad"? The smallest non-phone tablet devices are now (with the death of iPod touch) the size of (at best) a small note"book", not a sensibly-sized-for-portable-usage note"pad".
2) That doesn't even solve the problem as tons of Internet-connected messaging software now supports calls, so I feel like you are missing the point in some sense: the person you are responding to is seriously talking about WhatsApp!
To me, it's a good quality camera that I can fit in my pocket.
No, it's not. You sound like a dinosaur. A phone's primary functions are 1) text-messaging apps, 2) camera, 3) dating apps, 4) banking apps, and various others. Phone calls are somewhere around #20.
Phone calls haven't forced full screen takeovers for several years on iOS, and have the same UX as 3rd party VoIP and Video call apps...
I haven't taken a phone call in over a month now (from the Amazon delivery guy). I use dating and texting apps every day.
Phone = Telephone: The term telephone was adopted into the vocabulary of many languages. It is derived from the Greek: τῆλε, tēle, "far" and φωνή, phōnē, "voice", together meaning "distant voice".
Distant voice communication is the entire purpose for a phone.
Just because you want or expect your phone to do more, doesn’t make your desires the primary function of the device.
Names change much slower the function generally.
1. Allows an instant, full-screen foreground takeover over whatever else you are currently doing on the device
2. Rings and vibrates your device
3. Has a button that could allow an unknown person to send and receive audio to and from your device
4. All of this is triggered remotely, from anyone in the world, without any kind of user identification or authentication, besides a spoofable number
No app store's rules in either major ecosystem would allow such an abusive app. Yet, only because the legacy concept of a "phone call" exists, not only is the app allowed, but it's preloaded on every device out there!
The phone feature is a legacy feature that goes away with 2G. Soon carriers will only be moving data.
The providers have data to show that the phone functionality is not a primary use case. It is a legacy product whose overhead has a real cost on our economy.
When do we stop paying $10-$20 a month per lines of service, for the privileging of being interrupted? When do we stop calling it a smartphone and treating as such and recognizing it as as computer, a laptop for your pocket.
I expect those born in the last century to be most resistant to the deprecation of the 'phone call' as a concept. People also reminisced about having phone lines that were partied together. Imagine what scammers would do with that today.
Whatever telcos are doing these days would have led to jail time in the 1990s.
I would like to see a return to the government passing QOS laws for safety critical services, then enforcing them.
Since everyone is dunking on twitter these days: How is it legal for them to slap an auth wall on top of emergency response agencies' feeds? If I MITM'ed the emergency broadcast system with such bullshit, I'd go to jail. Twitter is used during emergencies by at least 100x more people than emergency broadcast.
If they made pads the size of my phone that could still use cell network internet and that I could put a custom OS on I'd consider it.
So? This is a way to improve phone calls.
Not for about fifteen years or so, no. I don't even have the Phone app on the front page of my iPhone, let alone allow it to sit in the dock. Regardless, whatever the primary function of the device, there is room for improvement over "it's always worked that way".
It’s like sending a calendar invite. Sure, you can send an invite with nothing but your email address and a date+time. But many people would find an empty invite a bit rude. It’s just polite to include some context about the meeting. The phone call should evolve in that direction.
No reason to make people work any harder than they do now.
I personally hate unscheduled calls, and I'd love it if everyone sent a text first to check if you're free for a call, and only call after you've accepted, but... that's just never gonna happen.
Well, what is stopping your wife from also texting you, if it was something important and she did not reach you? And what would force her, to use a potential subject line?
Otherwise it is an interesting idea, but I doubt it will be a killer feature, as most would simply ignore it.
[0]: https://support.google.com/android/answer/9069335?hl=en#zipp...
LOL. She does. "Call me"
Very helpful.
Yeah, I think it's called IM.
> It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context.
That's called DND, my phone is 100% time in DND mode. There are already filters for spam calls based on phone number.
> It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!”
Maybe tell wife to write you IM/SMS or just communicate through IM as priority, if you desire text communication?
Not the parent, but Dog knows I have been trying. Some people just don’t understand how disruptive an unnecessary phone call is.
Problem solved.
- arrange a call, which is great because then I am guaranteed to have the time to deal with the topic, I do that sometimes with my bank;
- leave a voice mail, which is not great but then I am not responsible for their phone number policy (nobody leaves voice mail anymore);
- send an email (or a SMS, a WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Skype, whatever, I am not picky), possibly to arrange a phone call, also great because I can answer written messages on my own terms and not when they feel like calling me;
- (most of the time these days) have a chat over whatever IM platform they integrated into their website.
My time is not theirs to use however they want. If they want me to be on call, that’s fine, but with compensation.
I once called my brother from a phone that was not mine, in the middle of the night, to inform him that our brother had died suddenly. He did not answer. He got that message in the morning when he checked his voicemail after waking up. He was very upset at the delay.
Filtering from unknown numbers is a hack, and it has consequences. We should not have to do it just to get some peace from our phones.
Well, sometimes shit happen. I can think of a handful of scenarios where I cannot be contacted and it’s right that sometimes it could be important. But I am not living on alert 24/7 because sometimes someone might die. My filtering system lets the second call through, which I think works fine as most spammers do not call twice within one minute. That said, in the middle of the night I still probably would not hear, but not because of that.
(I am sure that the situation was complex and difficult to manage enough for you to have to borrow a phone, and I do not envy you for having gone through it and am sorry you had to. In that situation I would be very upset regardless of the delay).
> Filtering from unknown numbers is a hack, and it has consequences. We should not have to do it just to get some peace from our phones.
That’s entirely right and I agree completely. But then we are where we are and the world often disagrees with me. Otherwise I could also get rid of my ads and trackers blockers.
For that matter, if I don’t respond to your email in a day, treat it like a phone call and just try again. Don’t assume I’m ignoring you. It’s just e-mail.
Différent generations have different norms and it’s not right or wrong.
My point was to emphasize how across generations, everyone seems to think that the youth have bad norms and it’s somehow wrong, and then they grow up and the world keeps spinning, and the cycle repeats.
It’s awfully vain to think that the norms of your generation in your nation at your point in time are magically the ”better” ones.
The parent comment reference a novel idea that phone calls could have a subject line. It’s novel, it’s clever, it would solve many problems beyond just “people are scared to be human”. The world moves on, and we can improve it or we can launch ad hominem attacks on the next generation.
Yes.
> and it’s not right or wrong.
No.
This sort of relativism of all norms, mores, morals, and ethics needs to stop. There are some cultural and social norms/mores that are better than others. We know this, because empirically some produce better outcomes than others. Mass-scale social anxiety at having to interact with another human being is NOT healthy for society, and is likely the underlying cause for a significant amount of the current social ills that are either new or increasing over time.
Every generation thought that society was collapsing. Despite that, time progresses, people age out of the population and a new generation is born. And society (mostly) doesn’t collapse.
Now I email hundreds of times a day, and have constantly shifted deadlines to no professional detriment. I still get nervous emailing a new important person, but you do it anyways.
Do people really forget what it’s like being young? Sometimes you just grow up and move on.
I mean... aren't you ignoring them? It's an email. Where'd the first one go that the second one is going to be any different?
Humans I know contact me through whatsapp. Or if they're old (and hell, I'm almost 40, so I mean old) through text or phone. Strangers' only real hope is text. I'll probably miss anything else. And even that is getting so goddamn spammy now that it's not far from being like email: only useful if I'm already expecting a message. I receive stupid political ads for states I've never lived in a couple times a day.
If you email me again, it might get read at a more convenient time, and I'll answer.
Same reason I might not answer your call: I'm busy with something else or not near my phone at the moment. This used to be normal by the way -- if I called your home phone and nobody answered, I'd have no choice but to call again later.
Is this 2018? C'mon - phone calls don't actually do full screen takeovers on your device anymore, do they?
Pixel phones have call screening feature. It can be enabled for all calls or unknown callers. It asks the caller to state the reason they are calling and notifies you with the text of the reason given and you can choose whether to accept or reject.
If you want something more then you could just ask callers to text you instead.
The flow I get people into is to communicate via text (slack, whatsapp, etc depending on the nature of the environment) with a "hey, is now a good time to call", or "I wanted to discuss XYZ", and we can then hash out the best method for communication.
The authors complaint is valid, but I think it is more of a UX issue, similar to what you're suggesting here.
Great handle BTW
It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. If call metadata included a subject line, software could automatically screen out calls where the subject is empty or spammy, just like with email.
It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!” It also removes the need to leave rambling voicemail.
The subject line takes only 15 seconds to write but will significantly reduce receiver anxiety, both synchronously and asynchronously. Sending a text after the call is not the same because it’s not in context.
I remember proposing this to WhatsApp while I was working at FB but the WhatsApp culture seemed uninterested in feature ideas of any kind. Hopefully someone else does it eventually.