15 Jul 2004 slamb   » (Journeyer)

Open-source cell phone UI

Today I got an Audiovox CDM8410, after my Nokia 3360 had problems with the LCD. I'm disappointed in its user interface:

  • It's hard to read the important information off the display. They've got a small clock on a multicolored background, a tiny signal strength indicator, and a tiny battery life indicator. My old Nokia 3360 has these in huge black letters on a white background. Consequently, the new one is unreadable without the backlight on. The old one's backlight is for dark rooms only.
  • You can put five phone numbers under one name...but they have to be labelled "General", "Mobile", "Office", "Pager", and "Fax". I want custom names like "Mom's House", "Apartment", "Hospital". I have friends with three jobs. Which one gets the "office" label? So I'm stuck with listing out all of the phone numbers individually.
  • The phone book's find feature sucks. I have 80+ numbers in my phone. Being able to get to a number quickly is the phone's most important UI task, and they screwed it up! (And this phone is the best of the three I examined, by far!) I picked it because you could get to Find with one button press. But I missed that it's a substring match, not a prefix one. (If I type in "C", I want all the names that start with "C". Not everyone who has a "C" anywhere in their name; combined with the above, this means a search for "C" shows everyone with a cell phone. Not useful.) And it has a delay before it actually starts searching. And if you backspace or hit an invalid character by mistake, it gets out of "Find" completely. Frustrating.

The old phone's interface was actually a little better. Cell phones are getting worse...the designers are too busy focusing on digital cameras, color displays, Bluetooth, games, and other crap to design phones. My new phone might not be the best available, but I think they all have these essential problems.

I might be able to sneak a good UI onto a cell phone. They sell them with J2ME and such for games now. If I take this back and exchange it for such a phone, I might be able to pull this off. Here goes:

Write a J2ME "game" called GoodUI. It would be an open-source interface to the cell phone. A main screen that shows the clock, antenna status, and battery status in huge letters. A phone book that doesn't suck. It just depends on having a decent API to the phone. In addition to needing enough storage space for its own address book, my game would need access to the real phone bits. It'd make calls, receive calls, get the antenna status, and get the battery status. Store a call log, etc. You'd have to play the game every time you start your cell phone, but after that you'd have a real UI.

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!