Recently, I’ve been borrowing a Nokia 6682 smart phone from my current employer in order to test out some of the new software that has been developed for these high-end handheld computing devices.  This will be the first in a series of posts about these software applications and my thoughts on them.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to pick up a phone call when I have no idea who might be calling me.  Today, the limiting factor is whether or not that number appears in your address book.  As I’m sure has happened to many of you, when I receive a phone call from a number I don’t recognize, the first thing I do is ask the people around me if they happen to know the location of the area code.  Unfortunately, the list of area codes that I have memorized is short and limited to places I have lived, have family, or major US cities. 

As early as six months ago, I started suggesting that this would be a great thing to have on cell phones.  Sure enough, within the last month, a Seattle-based company, Cequint, came out with just such an application. 

First, I would like to caveat my comments by saying that this is an early stage company with the first release of their software, so a few bugs are guaranteed.  With such an application now installed on my borrowed Nokia, you would think my problem would solved, right? Well it is, sort of. 

For numbers I don’t know, I now have the city and state from where the call is originating, which is a big help for figuring out if it is a call I want to take.  However, because the CityID application actually hi-jacks the incoming call notification of my Nokia and only presents the number as well as the city & state, it actually has a detrimental side effect – it doesn’t pull the name from my contacts!  In my opinion, this is a massive oversight by the programmers at Cequint, as it is actually a step backward in the functionality of my phone.  I don’t know how they could have released a product that didn’t integrate with the contact database that is resident in my phone.  The name of the person, by far, is the most important piece of information that can be presented to me on an incoming call.  To remove that piece of information and replace it with just the city and state information is ludicrous. 

Net-net, a big thumbs down for the current version of CityID and I will be removing it from my phone, for the reasons stated above.  Hopefully they will release an update soon that fixes this issue, but until then, stay away.