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Thinking about what mobile phones can do except messaging and voice calls is one of my main interests. At the department of Mobile Computing at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria), I can work on those ideas every day by collaborating with students, researching and - well - thinking.
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Andreas Jakl's Forum Nokia Blog
Automatically Calling Back Saves Money
mopius | 26 August, 2008 18:18
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| Auto Call Back can help you to save money. |
On the other hand, many friends and relatives have minute-based plans, which can be rather expensive if they're calling to other operators.
Rationally, it'd be the best if I call someone with a minute-based plan back and don't accept his call. In this scenario, nobody of us pays anything (extra). Obviously, it's a bit of work - you have to discard the call, go to the call history and call back.
Automatic Call Back
Already two semesters ago, two students (Dominik Brandlberger and Daniel Haslinger) developed a solution to this called "Auto Call Back" (why always invent strange names if it can be that simple?). The whole call-back process is automated by the application.
The result after one semester is a prototype and no commercial application - after all, both didn't have any serious Symbian OS development experience before and the whole issue turned out to be not so easy.
Apparently, you can't easily cancel calls that you don't own through the public CTelephony-APIs of S60 3rd Edition-phones - it only seems to work if you accept them first and immediately cancel them. However, this means that the caller already has to pay up to one minute, no matter how short the call was. Therefore, the application now cancels the calls through simulating the red key. The disadvantage here is that the mailbox has to be turned off for rejected calls.
But how does the app know for which contacts to do it? After the first initial experiments with an own database, the best solution turned out to put all those contacts into a special group. This also allows the user to easily manage the call-back contacts through the normal contacts-app of the phone; the call-back app doesn't have to re-invent the wheel.
The prototype is available for free, but of course not yet ready for real-world usage. It lacks many features and is by far not bug-free. Also, you need to sign it yourself through the Open Signed-process from Symbian Signed.
If anyone is clueless what application to develop next, I'd be very interested in getting a finished and polished application that can do exactly what the prototype can do. Or is there already anything around on the web that I didn't find?
Connectivity, Enterprise, General, S60, Symbian C++ |
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Error !
cyke64 | 28/08/2008, 09:44
Hello ,
I like this idea :)
But when I choose "List Contacts" in the application I have the following error :
Application closed:
AutoCallBack
USER 11
What's the problem ?
BR
Cyke64
Bugfix - Application Update
mopius | 28/08/2008, 18:42
Hi Cyke64,
thanks for trying the app, glad that you like the idea!
As the application is really a prototype, there are still a lot of issues hidden in the code. The USER 11 panic should be related to a descriptor not being long enough. I've taken a quick look at the source code of the contacts-part and increased the length of the descriptors. You can now download the updated version (v0.1.1) from Symbianresources.com. Maybe it fixes the problem.
However, actually you don't need the really simple contacts editor that's built into the app. Just create a contacts group called "AutoCallBack" and put all contacts that the app should call back into this group.
Then start the application, choose "Enable service" and move it to the background. At least on the two phones where I tried it, it worked fine - but as said before, it'd need a full code review and a lot more testing :)
Good luck,
Andreas
Re: Automatically Calling Back Saves Money
atv motor | 26/11/2008, 23:11
I like this idea.I know where your coming from regarding the situations in hand
ACB
GSi-R | 27/08/2008, 16:12
Great idea for an application, as I know where your coming from regarding the situations in hand, as I call back most people due to my unlimited tarrif etc.