Phone Technician: You Always Need One...

There will always be some small but irritating things that your Treo can’t or won’t do well or at all – this is when ‘enhancing’ applications such as Phone Technician come to the rescue and empower you to do more and better things with your Treo.

Phone Technician includes seven main levels of Treo enhancements that answer seven common questions:

1. Ringers: Why can’t I use MP3’s as ringtones and have more control over volume, vibrate and LED when receiving a call?
2. Disable Alarms: Why can’t I disable system alarms ringing so loudly in my ear during a call?
3. Screen Off During Calls: Why can’t I get the touchscreen on my Treo to turn off during a call so that a) I can save precious battery life and/or b) my ear/earing doesn’t accidentally activate the soft buttons on the screen?
4. Phone Connection: Why can’t I get my Treo to automatically turn On in the morning and Off at night at specified times throughout the week so as not to get unwanted calls waking me up in the middle of the night?
5. Easy Dial: How come if I can dial any number directly from a web page or an SMS message I cannot also do so from a Memo note or any other text on my Treo?
6. Sound Booster: Why can I still not hear my callers loud enough even though my handset volume is set to the max?
7. Easy Conference: How come it is so relatively complicated to start a 3–way phone conference on my Treo?

In my opinion Phone Technician answers all of the above seven questions extremely well.  Let me run you through each one individually in more detail below.

Ringers
Although the standard Treo ringtone management is adequate its major deficiency however is that it does not offer the option to pick an MP3 file as your ringtone.  Phone Technician resolves this completely plus also adds a few very nice finishing touches.

You simply need to ‘Pick Ring’ (above left) then select MP3 and use the pull-down menu to find a file on either your internal or external (SD card) memory.  Next you’ll have seven more customization options including:

• setting your Initial Volume (you can start at a low 2 for example and by ticking ‘Volume Increases’ it will go up by one notch at each repeat of your ringtone)
• increase the number of Vibrate from the standard 1 on your Treo to 10 times (I find this absolutely terrific since I can often miss calls while outside and I can’t hear my ringtone but can feel the vibrate)
• set your LED to various states such as Solid Green/Red/Orange to notify you of an incoming call
• set your ringtone to repeat every XX seconds (for example to play only the first 5 seconds of your MP3 and then repeating that section)

Disable Alarms
At any time during a call you may typically get interrupted by any one of your loud Calendar or other alarms.

Any Treonaut who has experienced this knows just how annoying it can be to suddenly have your train of thought interrupted in the middle of a conversation.

Phone Technician automatically suppresses these alarms during a call and resumes them once you have finished your conversation.

Screen Off During Calls
It wasn’t until I started to properly use Phone Technician that I realized just how useful this Screen Off function could be.

Not only is it true that I now save a significant amount of battery life during hours of calls but I now also ensure that I don’t accidentally hit one of the soft touch buttons (typically hanging up my call) with either my ear or fingers.

In particular women wearing earrings will now find it a lot less frustrating to deal with the touchscreen…

Phone Connection
If you have ever been woken up in the middle of the night by a caller who either didn’t know that you were six time zones away or just happened to dial the wrong number you’ll immediately understand the usefullness of getting your Treo to automatically switch On and Off at set times during the week.

Phone Technician allows you to either select one On/Off schedule that you can apply for all days of the week (you’ll need to press the right down arrow on the right of the screen) or to set individual On/Off times for each day of the week.

Additionally, the ‘On/Off Quietly’ will ensure that you don’t accidentally get woken up by your Treo late at night or early in the morning…

Easy Dial
Even though I have had a few instances where I had wished for this function to be available on my Treo it is possibly not one that many other Treonauts will have found an issue with.

Easy Dial basically allows you to select any numbers in an application such as Memo which does not have the ‘number hyperlinking’ functionality enabled and then dial or SMS to that number by simply highlighting it and pressing the green phone button.

My greatest wish is that Phone Technician would add something like this for web links and emails as well so that I could open a URL in my Memo in Blazer or send to an email address in my Memo as well – perhaps a future version will do this…

Sound Booster
If you don’t already have the bestselling VolumeCare utility installed on your Treo(see my review Loud & Clear With VolumeCare) then this function will allow you to boost the call volume past the maximum standard allowance of 7 Bars (below right).

Easy Conference
Again until I start using this functionality in Phone Technician I had never quite stopped to think about how complex the standard way of creating a conference call could be with my Treo requiring endless and somewhat unintuitive clicks.

Now thanks to Easy Conference I am able to start a 3–way conference at the push of a single button – I love its simplicity.

Conclusion
There is categorically no doubt in my mind that Phone Technician empowers you to do more with your Treo – it is one of the best and simplest customization utilities available and at $14.95 it also offers absolutely terrific value.

If you like Phone Technician I can also strongly recommend that you try out this developer’s other custom and bestselling applications for the Treo such as Butler and Initiate.  Also, you may want to view some of the other Top 100 Treo Software in my list.

Treonauts are always looking to be empowered…