Perks of being a technology journalist involves early access to smarter things be it smartphones, wearables or drones etc. But as journalists we also have to be critical of what we assess and write. And the burden gets heavier if you have to be completely unbiased, like in my case 😉
There are many things (products and services) that claim to be smart but aren’t really that smart. If I start writing about them then this will be a never-ending article. Henceforth, I’ll focus on something that is really considered smart and has miraculously changed the way we live our lives – The smartphones, this one device has replaced our good old phone, point-and-shoot cameras, calculators, torch, music players, FM radio, transcribers and what not. I’m sure there are many more things that you can list so please feel free to add them to the comment section below.
Moving back to how smartphones have become a natural extension of our lifestyle. Smartphone is something that we carry everywhere we go – Work, Jog, Shower/Swim (some people do have waterproof phones), Sleep (Bad habit if you keep it under your pillow). And the reason for this our dependency on them, be it our reminders or navigation. They actually have made us less efficient when it comes to retaining anything in our memory. We get reminded of meetings, birthdays etc; we don’t have remember ways as we are guided to the destination thanks to Google Maps and here too the list goes on and on.
But how many of you agree with me that no matter how smartphones have evolved they still are dumb in many ways. And one such thing that really annoyed me was the dailer of the smartphone. In 2007 when Steve Jobs came at WWDC and announced the iPhone, it changed the world. It literally did, we saw juggernauts like Nokia, Kodak, Palm to name a few perish as they couldn’t evolve and the touchscreen smartphone ate their market share and consumer love. It wasn’t just the iPhone but the penetration of Google’s Android that the most of the developed human race is using a smartphone today. But what has really changed for smartphone dialers since Android to Android Lollipop? Nothing, except it has become tougher and more confusing in the latest iteration of the OS. Still simply dumb if I may say so!
As I mentioned earlier, these dumb diallers annoyed me to the core and I was hell bent on changing things around for at least my likeliness on my phone. Sometime around last year, I searched for smart dialers on the the android market and came across the Truedialer. There were many more names in the list but I picked up Truedialer as it came from a reliable and know source – Truecaller.
Once Truedialer was installed, my smartphone got smarter to another level. My smartphone could now identify unknown numbers in the call log; gave me a smart keyboard in the dialler itself to swipe between dial pad, keyboard and favourites; got quick actions – where I could swipe a contact to view details or send a text; it supported both the sims on my device and showed different call logs; lastly simply typing a number to dial gave me access to user information even before I dialled.
Magical isn’t it? See it to believe it –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcsUwvNSEdY
Alas, the iPhone still stays dumb 😉
