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I love the idea, but I don't think I could trust myself with it. Generally my phone will still have a healthy chunk of battery left at the end of the day, but f
by corin_ 16y ago
I love the idea, but I don't think I could trust myself with it. Generally my phone will still have a healthy chunk of battery left at the end of the day, but fairly often, if I'm out of town for a day for meetings or whatever, by the time I'm back home I will have spent so much time on calls that it will have completely drained my battery.
One feature I'd love to see is connecting it with the doorbell, then I would forget about my battery worries and go straight for it. Would come in occasional use for if someone you're happy to let in arrives while you are out, but would also be great for day-to-day use. They press the buzzer, you get a phone call to talk to them followed by the option to let them in or not. (Where I live right now, my office is two floors up, it's pretty rare that I can hear anyone at the door.)
edit: The FAQ page is a bit vague about international orders due to "latency issues", any chance of some expansion on that? To my mind, a long distance (say, UK to California) is adding less than a second of latency, and I wouldn't have any problem if the door took a couple of seconds to unlock. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem latency causes?
- ccamrobertson 16y agoYou hit it on the head with the latency - although it only adds second or two at max, we want to make sure that we can keep it as short as possible. That said, we have a couple of international beta testers who seem to have a good experience, so I think that we will reevaluate this soon.
- corin_ 16y agoPersonally I don't think I'd care if it was a 10 second delay. (It often takes me that long to find the right key to open the door.) edit: One international issue that has occured to me is the cost of texting a foreign number. Do you have any idea of how many users you'd want to have from a country in order to get a number that's local to them? (And/or is your SMS provider unable to do that?)
- ccamrobertson 16y agoWe currently use Twilio, but they removed their beta international SMS support a while ago. That said, Tropo has international numbers in some countries. I think that 4-5 customers using our text message feature would be sufficient for us to consider internationalizing SMS, assuming Tropo support in that country.
- wheels 16y agoI've worked with both the TextMagic and Clickatell APIs (there are Ruby gems for both, we've used them for server monitoring notification) and they're really trivial to use and work internationally.
- jeffiel 16y agoEmail me your account sid, and we'll enable international SMS for your account. jeff at twilio
- wheels 16y agoStash an extra charger cable outdoors? I wonder if that could eventually be worked into the product somehow; i.e. a DC current where there's a recessed spot for an adapter...
- astrofinch 16y agoHm, but phones still break a fair amount more often than keys...