Saturday, October 11, 2008

Put this in the rumored Google Phone and I'm sold.

During my junior year of college I took a TV Production class. One of our first assignments was to come up with an advertisement for something. After not too much debate, my group ended up making a commercial for a product that was essentially a breathalyzer for your cell phone, I think it was called the "Drunk Dialer" or something like that. As you can probably figure out for yourself, the purpose was to prevent drunk dialing. In the years since that class there have been many times in my life where I wish such a product not only existed, but came standard with all Samsung phones. Nobody likes that sinking feeling you get the next day when you look at your outgoing calls and think to yourself "I called him/her, what the Hell was I thinking?"

All hope is not lost, however, apparently the geniuses at Google are making headway towards such technology. Today I learned of a new feature in Gmail called Mail Goggles, the purpose of which is to prevent people from sending drunk emails. While this has never really been a problem for yours truly, I very much appreciate the innovation here. Basically what it does is ask you to solve a series of math problems after you hit the send button. If you get them correct your message will be sent and I assume the opposite happens if you get them wrong. Additionally, the default settings for this feature are late at night on the weekends, though they can be adjusted with in the settings. You can read all about the feature here. As for those of you who are skeptical as to whether this actually exists, I just went into my Gmail and confirmed it.

Now Google just needs to implement this technology into cell phones and I'll be good to go, like a Crunchwrap Supreme.

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