Todd Stadler's blog

An engineer dials his phone

Like half the planet, I own a Motorola Razr phone. It's almost two years old, but it's still slim, so I still like it.

Well, sort of. For one thing, its phone book is terrible. I don't know if later versions of the phone (either software or hardware updates) fixed this problem, but on mine, you can only search by the first letter of the contact's name.

Here's what I mean. To get to the M section of my phone book, I press 6 (i.e. MNO). It takes me to the first entry whose first letter begins with M. And that's it. If I press 6 again, I go to the first entry starting with N.

Now, I'm not the best-connected person in the world, but I still have over a dozen contacts that start with M. It'd be nice if I could just type out a name — for example, 6453 for Mike — and be taken to his entry. In fact, my previous phone worked like that. But it wasn't slim.

No, on the Razr, I have to press 6 and then scroll down a ridiculous number of times. It's stupid. And if I had more people in my phone book, it would be unbearable.

I suppose the obvious solution, according to what the phone offers, is to set up voice dialing for all my frequently called numbers — you know, where you press a button, say your friend's name into the phone, repeat it louder, and then have to explain to your other friend that you weren't trying to call her, but your phone screwed up, and then you have to explain that you didn't mean how that sounded.

Yeah, I hate voice dialing, just as much as I hate voice-activated phone menus. I don't talk to machines. At least, not politely.

I thought of giving my frequently called contacts a speed-dial number, but I couldn't think of a particularly good, memorable order for my friends after the first and second spot (that would be Julia and my parents, respectively).

Then I realized that, rather than trying to somehow rank my friends and remember who was number seven and who was number nine, I would assign speed-dial numbers based on their names.

If I define a function ph(N) such that, for the name N, it returns the phone digit corresponding to the first letter of that name, then it turns out that for all my frequently called friends, the space {ph(FirstName), ph(LastName)} is remarkably evenly distributed.

That is to say, if I want to call my friend Aaron Kunze, I just dial his initials (25), followed by the pound key, and then hit Send. And it so happens that I don't know anyone else whose initials map to 25. I don't think any of my friends overlap like that.

Anyhow, I don't know if someone else has already thought of this, or if the Razr's phone book has been improved in the past two years so that this hack is obsolete, but on the off chance that this idea is useful to someone else, I'm putting it out there.