Title: Caller ID
Developer: WhitePages
Available: Now, Android Market
Cost: FREE
Lasting Impression: A must have application to enhance your location based handsets. Full of easy to use features that only help make life easier.
Nitty Gritty: Above and beyond the normal caller ID feature that comes standard with your wireless carrier’s plan, this application tosses in some helpful information. Each time you receive a call, the incoming phone number is checked against a database of over 200 million records and you get instant access to names addresses alongside phone numbers.
Once you’ve received calls through the Caller ID, you can add that name as a contact, view the location on a map, add and then pull up directions to said address. Even though the app says it requires 3G or WiFi to work properly, we found it able to pull up just fine over EDGE. We hardly ever get to a call on the first ring, so maybe it takes an extra second or two to pull it. Either way, we were pleased with it.
One of the things we expected to see was if the incoming call was a landline or not. It’s hard to say how accurate this is after only a few days, but in the scope of things, this is one of the features that we could live without.
The app only pulls records that are listed publicly, but we did notice that it was listing cities in places where names were not known. Cell phone numbers generally don’t have full caller ID listed, we saw the program giving us a general location on the map anyway.
This program does not seem to slow anything down on our handsets so we’ve let it run continuously. We noticed in the “About” section that there is an option to check for updates. We’re not sure what other updates you might get aside just yet, but it’s nice to see that in there.
The look and feel of this program are very intuitive with little or no need to use buttons. The only time we found ourselves using it was when we had the map up.
