Sunday, July 10, 2005

Good idea.... poor execution

I suggested yesterday that placing "ICE" in one's phone to let emergency workers who to call in an emergency was a great idea.

In principle yes.... except now that my emergency contact's number appears in two locations in my phone's address book, the phone doesn't know which "name" to show when they ring. D'oh!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I haven't tried this yet, so don't shoot me down if it doesn't work... but what if your ICE contact had a number like 07777 111111 and the 'proper' contact had a number like +44 7777 111111 (or the other way round?)

Depends on how the network and/or handset handles (a) the number of the incoming call, (b) the mapping of +44 7777 to 07777 and vice versa If your contact's number always gets converted to a +44 number, then this might work, depending on the handset...

Of course, if you have an emergency abroad they would have to know that the contact number was a UK one. Maybe have another entry called ICECountryCode... mmm, over-engineering.

Richard Brown said...

Hehe.... At the risk of exposing quite how deep my visceral need to know *everything* goes, I did actually read the instruction manual for my first Nokia from start to finish...

I remember it telling me that it matches numbers in the phone book against incoming calls by comparing just the final six digits (precisely to avoid problems such as '+' prefixes and perhaps also some networks' tendencies to use cell location information to support the concept of "local" numbers).

I guess one could check quite easily whether this is still true with more modern phones.

In the end, I solved the problem by storing the number under a non-numeric field (e.g. "City" or "Company"). The phone doesn't recognise it as a number and so doesn't try to match againt it).

Now I think about it... that probably means the number isn't diallable by scrolling down and hitting "green".

Never mind... we'll only hit that use case extremely rarely..... :-)