How mobile phone ringers should work

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While sitting in front of my computer at 9:00 PM in my completely silent office, I was scared half out of my wits by my Sidekick’s email alert. It’s even worse when I have it sitting out and it not only chimes, but also vibrates against my desktop like some old door buzzer. Of course there are other times — in loud, crowded restaurants, or outside among the din of the city — when I can’t hear my phone ring at all, and since I keep it in a dorky leather holster attached to my belt instead of in my pocket (who wants to risk cancer down there?), I often can’t feel it vibrate, either.

So I started wondering why mobile phone ringers aren’t smarter. Just like my PowerBook will dim my screen based on a sampling of ambient light, why can’t a phone sample ambient noise in order to decide how it should alert you? If you’re sitting in your office and it’s dead quite, a soft, pleasant chime should do the trick, but if you’re having a drink in a loud bar or walking down a busy street, it should blare and vibrate.

I know some phones have the ability to gradually increase the volume of the ringer the longer a call goes unanswered which is a nice low-tech solution, however I’ve found that if you’re in a noisy environment, by the time you realize your phone is ringing, you’re not likely to be able to recover it from wherever you have it stashed before the caller is forward to voicemail (and you already know how I feel about voicemail).

Another low-tech solution I’ve noticed is keeping your phone out in front of you on the bar. Of course, problems with that approach include: spilling beer on it, other people spilling beer on it, and getting drunk and leaving it behind. Besides, why throw a low-tech solution at a problem when it’s so much fun to over-engineer one.

7 thoughts on “How mobile phone ringers should work”

  1. I think you might want to think this through a little more.
    If the phone went into “quiet mode” and you missed an important call because you went to to get a cup of coffee from the coffee maker 20 feet away, you would be blogging about how phones shouldn’t override settings on their own.
    Users should set their preferences, machines shouldn’t over-ride them.

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  2. Not sure what you mean. This seems like a perfect case for smart ringers. Assuming you are wearing the phone, it would automatically adjust to the noise in your immediate area. If you walked over to a loud coffee maker, it should ring more loudly. If you wandered away where it was quiet, the ring would be softer in order to not draw unwanted attention. Or am I misunderstanding?

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  3. I think he means the case where you are not wearing the phone, which is the only problem I see with your original idea. If I leave me phone upstairs on the dresser, and I’m downstairs eating dinner, I won’t hear the phone ring.
    I suppose maybe a smarter phone and a smarter holster could help this situation. If the phone new when it was out of the holster, and the holster knew when it was not attached to your belt/etc. then it could perhaps make a more intelligent decision based on it’s state and your preferences.
    Or maybe we could all get some sort of radio beacon implanted in our bodies, that way the devices around us would know our proximity. :-)
    BTW — I’m going to start calling you at 9PM now — just to keep your heart rate up :-)

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  4. Another great topic regarding smarter ring tones. The way I have remedy the problem has been with “VOICE ringers.” What the hell is that? Well I went to AT&T Labs for text to speech and created a bunch of Messages for a group of people, and made them polite enough that when the phone rings it just sounds like someone is talking to me. Instead of a loud ring or a vibration. Even in noise places I have been able to hear the phone ring, or speak in my case. Which made me feel good. I have this sexy english woman on mine, that speaks: “UHMMM, excuse me sir, you have a phone call on line 1 waiting.” I get a kick out that every time I hear it.
    Keep the great ideas coming.

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  6. Sometimes for me also the ringing of my mobile phone scares me. I had a mobile phone before which has the feature of slowly increasing the Ringtone volume as the phone rings.

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  7. Sometimes for me also the ringing of my mobile phone scares me. I had a mobile phone before which has the feature of slowly increasing the Ringtone volume as the phone rings.

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