Exit awkward situations with the FakeCalls iPhone app

Venture Beat — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 11:56:47 -0800

Sometimes I wish I had a secretary — not just to do my busy work, but so I could tell them to call my phone after a few minutes if I’m in a meeting I don’t want to be in. You know, the old: secretary calls the phone, you answer and then turn to the person you’re meeting with and politely say, “Sorry, I have to take this.” Now there’s an iPhone application that allows you to do just that without the need for a secretary.

FakeCalls is a very simple app. Basically, it just mimicks the phone call receiving process on an iPhone. You load up the app and it will open a page that looks just like the standard iPhone “locked” view. (You can set it to have any background you’d like.) After a set amount of time, your phone will start ringing and vibrating indicating an incoming call.

Of course, there is no one on the other end of the line.

You can set the amount of time the app will wait before it makes the “call” in the settings. It ranges all the way from 0 seconds up to 10 minutes. It’d be nice to see this setting go a bit higher, so you could use it to end a 30 minute or hour-long meeting.

The 0 second setting seems quite pointless because you would have to take out your phone, load the app, and then it would call you immediately before you even got a chance to put your phone away. The person who you are trying to get away from might suspect something with that timing.

You can also set the name (or number) of the caller to anyone you want in the settings, as well as what number they are calling from (mobile, home, work, etc).

The app, created by developer Sebastian Trujillo is available in Apple’s App Store for $0.99. Sure, it’s not free, but the amount of time such an app could free up should well be work a buck. Trujillo’s company MagicTap.net also promises to give 10 percent of all earnings to charity.

Find FakeCalls here.

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Exit awkward situations with the FakeCalls iPhone app