multiple vibrate options

I think Charlie Schick has Twittered about this, but as I get more and more SMS traffic, it would be great if my phone supported multiple vibrate patterns, a la ringtones.  (I always have my phone on vibrate, because in I have an impossible time actually hearing my phone ring.  Either I'm getting older (speak up, sonny) or I'm deliberately ignoring incoming calls.)

Here's what I want.

• Bzzt == twitter or other automated SMS.
• Bzzt bzzt == SMS from an actual human.
• Bzzt bzzt bzzt == phone call.
• Special pattern of bzzt's == phone call from someone special

Couldn't be that hard, could it?

Comments

[Byrne Reese]

Now if only you could find a way to set a "bzzt bzzzzzt bzzzzzzt " ring tone. Mine does that all the time, but I can't find the setting to turn it off. It is really quite annoying.

[Byrne Reese]

The alleged humor of my last comment is lost by the fact that my angle brackets were stripped. :-O>

It should read: "bzzzt bzzzzzzt bzzzzzzt <phone falls off table and onto floor>"

[harold]

the blackberry pearl can do some of the above. i don't think it can determine "real" SMS from automated, but the other distinctions are possible, as are custom profiles where you can disable some or all of the vibrations in certain circumstances.

[bryan]

it seems to me that the idea of arbitrary contact groupings is still totally absent from technology and I don't understand why. Friends and family are fine groupings but what about "friends from work" or "ex girlfriends" or "crazy family members?" Phones and websites would both benefit from the ability to cater views/profiles to more than one or two groupings.

[tozé]

i think it's possible, all the nokias i had had vibrating alerts according to the ringtone assigned, different ringtone, different vibration 'pattern'.

[michael sippey]

I haven't been able to figure it out on my Nokia; could be user error but from the UI it seems that there is only one type of Vibrate alert; I haven't been able to find the option that exposes the different types of vibrating alerts, unfortunately...much less assign them to different SMS messages based on sender...

[Rich Lafferty]

My RAZR v3c has vibration patterns you can assign the same way you assign ringtones, but you can only assign one or the other to a number.

[K1rk]

Don't you mean "Couldn't be that hard, could it, Sonny?"?

[richard]

Boyer's right (again). There are some projects floating around related to setting up portable, arbitrary contact groupings, but the hard part is getting them adopted by everyone else. True data interoperability is still really low on everyone's list of to-dos. Grrrr.

[Ken Murray]

Hey Michael,

I was having dinner with some friends tonight and had the same thought -- blackberry buzzed, and I knew not if it was a) my daughter complaining about my son's 12 year old peccadillos [sms]; b)my boss, wondering what today's numbers looked like [email]; c)my son, informing me the dog ate another sock [voice]. As the b-berry buzzed and I reached for it, one of my dinner-mates said "don't you dare!" -- I suppose if I could differentiate I probably would have ignored them all anyway, but it would be nice to be able to discern.

[charlie]

yeah, vibra is so underutilized in phones. instead, we have them hyper-annoying key and warning tones (first thing i turn off when i get a new device).

doing something like you describe is on my list of fun thing to try out (hack) in python - if i could ever program in python.

here's how i'd do it:
- turn off all msg tones (manually via profiles).
- create an app that watches for a message to come in.
- app parses message and plays approrpriate buzzings.

you could set the buzz pattern via a list that shows all the contacts (app reads just the msg header). twitter is regular, so it reads the username.

catch? the app has to be always open. the vagaries of auto-kill of apps in s60 would make that annoying. but i am sure that there are some ways to keep an app open in a protected state.

[Hugo]

You could have it go bz bz bzzzt in Morse code!

But more seriously, there are things under research called "earcons" that are sounds that can encode complex information. They could be modified and extended to include vibration as well.

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~stephen/generalearcons/generalearcons1.shtml