SKIRMISHER

Call yourself in the future. Detect ghosts. Discern if your lover is telling the truth or just bullshitting you. Indulge in a texting love affair with your, uhh, clothes?

These are just some of the very normal things you can do if you have a mobile phone and some extra bucks to spare. Wild mobile apps that probably make having sex with baby squirrels seem a pretty ordinary thing. And because we’re shameless copy/pasters and extensive blockquoters, we’re reprinting the wild mobile apps list for you, all behind Telecoms Asia’s back.

The full list after the jump.

1. Lie/Love detector
Want to know if the person you’re calling loves you? Or, if he/she says “I love you”, whether they’re telling the truth? South Korean cellco KTF has the app for you.

The “Truthful Calls” service uses a voice analysis system by Israeli company Nemesysco that functions as an emotion detector, assessing the level of honesty of the person you’re calling. Throughout the conversation, the analysis system plays different sounds to flag statements worthy of further inspection and to mark different emotional states. When you hang up, you get a message with a bar graph depicting truthfulness, along with stress levels, inaccurate answers and attempts to divert the topic.

The Nemesysco technology also powers KTF’s “Love Detector” service, which works the same way but reports to you at the end of the conversation the “love level” of the person you’ve called - overall level of affection, plus graphs that measure various attributes such as level of interest, attention, expectation and embarrassment.

Interestingly, this isn’t that new. Apart from the fact that KTF launched a similar service two years ago, apps developer Agile Mobile announced a lie-detector app for Nokia handsets in 2003. The difference may be that Nemesysco’s technology has been field-tested by Israeli intelligence agency Mossad (according to KTF, anyway).

2. Call yourself in the future
From Web services company CDyne, a Web-based app that allows you to call yourself in the future. Really!

The basic object is to schedule a call in advance by going to the callthefuture.org Web site and filling out the appropriate fields, which includes the time you want the call placed and the text of a message you want to send. When it’s time, the server will call the number and text-to-speech software reads out the message to the caller.

The point? CDyne says the tool can be used to phone in a reminder to yourself, or it can be used to play pranks on your friends or give yourself an excuse to leave a date, family event, editorial meeting, whatever.

3. Ghost detector
TV show tie-ins are becoming a frequent excuse for mobile apps. Mobile content development company Wiretown (started, appropriately, by two men with TV broadcasting backgrounds) have developed a paranormal detector for cellphones.

Intended to promote a UK TV show called “Derek Acorah’s Ghost Towns,” the detector - co-developed with mobile specialist Future Platforms - purportedly uses existing mobile phone technology and “current parapsychological theory” to “detect subtle electrical changes around the user that some experts say are associated with paranormal activity,” says Wiretown co-founder Tim Usborne.

No idea if it actually works, but Usborne says the app does “provide the viewer with a unique and engaging way to interact in real time with the show,” according to Interactive TV Today. In any case, it probably works as well as the keitai ghost-detector charms on sale in Japan that light up when ghosts are nearby.

4. Car alarm
With the car theft rate in New Zealand approaching 36,000 a year, incumbent operator Telecom New Zealand and Navman New Zealand have developed a car alarm system that relies on mobile tech to let you know when someone’s making off with your car.

The “Silent-I” system not only sends an SMS to the car’s owner if the car senses a break-in, it also tracks the car’s location and even the speed it’s going.

For example, according to Telecom, if the culprit turns out to be, say, your underage joyriding teenage son or daughter, you’ll be notified by SMS that they’ve borrowed the car without your permission and they’re driving a good 20 kmh over the speed limit.

5. Spy phones
It sounds like something straight out of Q’s labs in the James Bond films, or a cheesy TV drama - an ordinary-looking mobile phone that actually doubles as an eavesdropping device. Give one to your philandering spouse (for example), then use another phone to dial a special access number. The “spy phone” answers but doesn’t ring or vibrate or light up or do anything to let anyone in the room know that the phone is now on an open voice channel. If the target picks up the handset and presses a key, the connection is broken and the phone works normally.

It’s an idea that’s been around for a couple of years, but Motorola, Nokia and Siemens all have spy-phone models that can be had via Web sites like Spyphones.com. Certain Siemens models come with an “interceptor” function that allows you to hear phone calls made by the user, and even sports an SMS alert function to notify you when the phone is being used.

Meanwhile, thanks to companies like Vervata, no special phone is required. Vervata’s FlexiSpy software can be installed on the target handset to allow the eavesdropper to secretly record the unsuspecting user’s SMSs and call history, among other things.

WARNING: Such apps are likely to be illegal in your home market. Or at least highly unethical and sneaky. In fact, FlexiSpy is categorized as a Trojan in F-Secure’s virus database.

6. Halal verification service
Sometimes the best mobile apps are the simplest - like an SMS-based service in Malaysia that allows Muslims to conform the halal status (which is to say “permissible” under Islamic law) of products.

Launched earlier this year by the Islamic Development Department of Malaysia (Jakim), the service works by users sending an SMS with the word “halal” with the product’s bar code number to a short-code number. The product info is then sent back to the user.

7. Liquid wallpaper
Technically more of a user-interface feature than an app, but still innovative: the N702iS handset (developed by NEC, NTT DoCoMo and Japanese design company Nendo) comes with sensor-driven wallpaper that makes the screen look like a glass of liquid.

The wallpaper - which Wireless Asia reported on last month - is part of the overall liquid theme of the handset (which also sports bubble lights on the back of the handset that move like bubbles when an incoming call or message is received). Triple-axel speed sensors create a “liquid” effect - tilt the handset, and the “liquid” tilts accordingly the way water would in a tilted glass. It even comes with an hourglass feature.

More interestingly, it’s not just eye candy. The liquid wallpaper also serves as a battery level indicator - the lower the volume of water, the lower the energy left in the battery. Clever.

8. Send SMS messages and emoticons to your clothes
Cellphones have long since made the jump from comms device to fashion accessory, so why not SMS? Several projects have emerged recently that combine text messaging and clothing.
For example, Uranium-Jeans has a line of “interactive clothing” that comes with embedded flexible micro screens that display images and scrolling text messages that can either be downloaded from Uranium’s Web site or sent by SMS.

Another example is MoBeeline, a company out of the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program, which features clothes with Bluetooth-enabled LEDs that display emoticons sent from cellphones. The sender can also modify the colors or patterns of the garment.

9. Camera dictionary
With cameras virtually a standard feature on handsets nowadays, handset makers and apps developers alike have been looking at ways to transform the camera into an input device. Barcode scanning is one idea. Another, from Japanese company Mediaseek, is a camera-enabled dictionary service.

Camera Dictionary is a software app that allows users to scan English words using their camera phones and translate them to Japanese. The app also provides online links to more info about the word, like pronunciations and usage examples.

10. Mobile breathalyzer
Not sure if you or your driver has had one too many martinis? Use your mobile phone to check his or her alcohol level via a breath analyzer connected to the handset.

LG has had a consumer breathalyzer phone out for about a year, and NTT DoCoMo launched a mobile breathalyzer service for enterprises in June. Say you’re a transport agency and you want to randomly spot-check your drivers. Make a video call and have the driver breath into the analyzer (the video connection intended to be a safeguard against the driver getting a breath sample from a nearby sober person). The breath/alcohol data is sent to a transport company’s central database. If the driver tests positive, a large red warning appears on the driver’s phone screen. Busted!

via TEXTUALLY

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