Ideas for fun phone applications

I ordered an OpenMoko phone last night, and I had a little brainstorming session about funny things I would like to see in a phone that aren’t commonly implemented yet. Here is my list so far:

Software Ideas:

  1. Voice Shifter: Change your voice, or the voice of the person you are talking to!
  2. Media Player Remote: Control your computer stereo (via Bluetooth)
  3. Blogger: Update your blog directly, include audio (like LogJam)
  4. Door Opener: Unlock your door (car, house) automatically (via Bluetooth)
  5. Picture phone book: Dial someone by selecting a photo
  6. Doom: Everyone wants to play doom; prolly difficult on a touchscreen device
  7. RSS Reader: The phone is going to come with one of these, so its probably somebody else’s problem
  8. VNC: View your desktop remotely. The screen resolution is 480×640, so this has a chance of being useful
  9. Home Control: This _has_ to be done, could be achieved through a computer link as a proof of concept

Hardware Ideas:

  1. Accelerometer: This will be added to the next version, but a preview hack would be fun
  2. Gamepad: The USB port is unpowered, hack a gamepad with a battery to plug into it
  3. Zigbee: This would be nice, could possibly be handled by an external Bluetooth-Zigbee bridge
  4. Flashlight: Turn off the display, turn on a superbright LED (useful for reading at night)

Have anything you have been dying to see in a phone? Let me know!

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3 Responses to Ideas for fun phone applications

  1. Me says:

    You are definitely treading on my grounds now.
    We need to talk.
    I like the Openmoko as well and I plan to use it for my project.
    Definitely we should talk.
    Check this one also: http://www.moblin.org
    The future looks bright :)

  2. Me says:

    Did you order the developer kit as well?
    Can you recompile the OS and reload it into the phone?

  3. mahto says:

    Hey hey,

    I did order the advanced version. The developer environment is free software and is downloadable from the OpenMoko site (see MokoMakefile if you haven’t already found it). You can certainly recompile the OS, or even replace it with something different if you want. Actually, you don’t really need the advanced version to do this, because the bootloader (Uboot) has the ability to flash through USB- but i thought it would probably be nice to have a jtag debugger.

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