Brainstorm is here:
http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...s_in_phone_ui/

One of the challenges in using the N900 as a phone is that user interactivity with phone calls often has soft real-time requirements which application performance issues sometimes get in the way of. This can be particularly bad when using services such as Google Voice or calling cards which require multiple interactions.

For example, take the following scenario that I have experienced many times:

• My phone starts ringing in my pocket with a call routed via Google Voice (which means the caller has already been waiting 1-3 seconds as that latency seems to be inherent in the system).
• I pull the phone out of my pocket (which is sometimes a tricky decision due to the lack of per-caller ringtones so I have no idea who is calling). This takes a few seconds.
• I try to look at the screen to see who is calling, but it is busy rotating the screen (which has an animation that can take a second during which time the screen is unreadable).
• I click answer once the screen is done rotating and then press the button to bring up the keypad so I can press "1" to accept the call. If I'm unlucky, at some point the accelerometer will have decided that I rotated the phone differently as part of taking it out of my pocket and I'll have to wait through the animation again. If I'm particularly unlucky, some part of the UI or application will have gotten swapped out when I had the phone off and things will crawl down and take a few more seconds.
• The result of all of this is that I end up with a missed call more often than not as the caller sometimes has given up by the time I've completed the task of answering the phone.

Google Voice is just one example use-case for this. Similar problems exist with calling cards or phone trees where users need to jump back and forth between the keypad, the phone app, and other apps.

This brainstorm is for identifying solutions for improving this class of experience --- in particular, making the phone more usable as a phone where people need to interact with it in real-time. (Some of the solutions will presumably overlap with solutions for other brainstorms.)

More general phone-related improvements are discussed in this other brainstorm:

http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...ne_experience/


Some possible solutions that might help areas of this:

• Solution #1: Speed up or eliminate screen rotation animation
• Solution #2: Add physical buttons for some common phone actions
• Solution #3: Numeric keypad always available in phone app
• Solution #4: Add per-caller and per-call-group ringtones
• Solution #5: Improve real-time task performance of phone app/ui under resource pressure

double entry for phone app,
there is already a meta-brainstorm for the phone app, please change your brainstorm to a more specific/precise problem or remove it and contribute to the other phone-app related brainstorms please.