Orientation Dependent Ringtone

As I mentioned yesterday I had a different Idea on dealing with the problem of cell phone ringers.

I’ve split this into a second post because I feel that it is suitably different. It is something that could also likely be immediately implemented with a software update.

I know personally, if my phone is in my pocket, ‘1 Beep’ mode is loud enough for me to know that its rung. However, I generally leave it on the highest ringtone. The reason is that eventually I will set it down somewhere on a table. I leave the ringer on loud in those cases so that I can hear it from the next room.

So 75%-90% of the time (ballparking it), I would like my phone to be in ‘1 Beep’ mode in my pocket, and full blown ring mode when it’s out of my pocket. The problem is simply that its too much ‘work’ for me to remember to change it all the time. If just once I forget to put it into full ring mode, I might miss an important call.

Well a lot of phones now come equipped accelerometers. They can sense their orientation in your hand and will change the screen orientation to match. Well whenever I see my phone on a coffee table, it is lying flat. When it is in my pocket its usually at some weird angle.

Phones could use this accelerometer data to adjust the ringtone volume. If the phone sense that it’s at a flat horizontal position and not moving, then turn up the ringtone. If it’s vertical or some other angle, turn it down to beep (or vibrate / soft-ring / whatever the user sets in the preferences).

This is something that phones already equipped with the hardware (iPhones and many of the phones inspired by iPhones) could do with just a software update. It would take a bit of work calibrating to ensure that it was not twitchy and always changing the ringtone. You would not want it to be overly sensitive, or under sensitive. But this is nothing that a few weeks of testing couldn’t hammer out. If people wanted this, I wouldn’t be surprised if we could have it in our phones by the end of next month.

I know it’s something that I would use.