Since we increasingly use dial-by-name rather than dial-by-number, the use of phone book (contacts) on your handset is perhaps the most utilized application. And there is plenty of room to enhance it. The phone book could be engineered to be more proactive and be able to make suggestions to the user. For instance it could let me enter 10 most important contacts that I call at least once a week, and then have it send me a reminder in case I forget to call one of those 10 numbers during the week.
There are countless such features that could be engineered into a phone book. You could also let the phone book application automatically monitor the calls received, missed, dialled out, the duration of the calls etc – the entire calling behaviour of the user, and then suggest actions or, eg, alert the caller to any extreme variation. For example if you talk too much, it could alert you something to the effect that your average call duration is 3 times the average in this country … sort it out.
Some of the things that an intelligent phone book could do:
Displaying number of an unknown caller is no good. Called ID needs to evolve to display name of the caller even if you don’t have caller’s number in your phone book. An intelligent phone book itself could facilitate that by requesting an appropriate caller ID header.
Some of the MS Outlook functions like automatically adding new contacts to the phone book, ability to select recipients and send a voicemail to multiple contacts etc etc
If there is a natural calamity in town X, the phone book (connected to some online news source) could search my phone book and see if any of my contacts are based in X and prompt me to call them.
Hooks into things like LinkedIn so that you get LinkedIn updates (of your contacts) through your intelligent phone book.
More suggested features later.
