I have a development iPhone and as such I have the 3.0 firmware on mine. I also own a .mac account. Aaaaand I saw the latest WWDC keynote that talked about a really, really cool feature called ‘Find my iPhone’.
This feature in and of itself is very awesome. What if I want to take it a step further though?
I work in a position in which I could be needed 24x7x365. I am not alone. Many doctors may need to be paged, many other companies have their own Ben (albeit not as good looking) which run infrastructure and need to always be on call. Sure we can carry a pager with us, but LAME. Now you’re thinking, why not just use SMS on my iPhone? Ah, why indeed…
SMS is great, acts a lot like a pager, only problem is that when I silence my phone in a movie and forget to unsilence it when I get home and someone needs to get me, they can’t. If my phone is in my pocket while driving and I don’t hear the initial ping, then I may not get the message for several hours. There are many scenarios where either the phone is silenced or I simply need a more annoying alert. One could argue that it is a workflow issue, but I would argue back that many, many others have this exact same issue.
The solution is to extend the ‘Find my iPhone’ paging feature to trusted users. Allow other family members, or business acquaintances to page my iPhone and have the phone ignore its silent status, nagging me until I accept the critical message. Keep in mind this would only be used in a ‘my patient is dying, I need to get the Dr. NOW’ or ‘All servers are offline and you’ll be out of a job on Monday if you don’t answer’ type scenario. That way when I’m in the middle of a wedding, the bride is about to say “I DO!” and my iPhone starts making a pinging noise, I don’t have to get really pissed at whoever pinged me (although the bride will ban me from all future events).
I could give out my me.com account info to everyone who needs to page me (and I probably will) but that means that everyone can see my address book, read my e-mail and get other information that is personal. I *just* want to give them access to the ability to page my iPhone without the ability to see my information.
I think this would be an awesome addition to the iPhone lineup and would be very, very helpful for any professional that needs to be on-call 24×7. Why carry a pager when an iPhone can do it all? Alas, I have a feeling that this will never, ever be deployed by Apple and with the lack of background apps I don’t think this can be built by a third party either. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to set up a dummy Me.com account and give everyone access.
It sure would be cool though, no?
Maybe not a bad idea…
I have a similar situation, I’m a volunteer firefighter/EMT. The way our system operates, I’m pretty much always “on call”. For this purpose, I carry around a Motorola Minitor IV VHF voice pager pretty much everywhere I go…and it works pretty well….
But…A number of factors conspire to make me start looking into other possible solutions. SMS, commercial digital paging, automated phone tree, etc solutions are being explored. But the focus keeps coming back to the cellular phone that’s already in everyone’s pocket. If I could get a way into everyone’s phone that gives me a highly reliable way to alert a moderate number of people about an emergency situation with little or no systemic lag, I’d stand in line to sign up.
(But, given that AT&T is now asking us all to use less bandwidth, not more, maybe they’re not interested, eh?)