AndroidActivist - By And For The Community!

Who the heck is calling me!?

No matter how private I try to keep my number, people seem to get my number somehow, in one way or another. This is fine, as long as it’s not always a prank call, but what I dislike the most, is when I pick up and nobody talks! For some reason, I have to call that number back, unless it’s private; then I wait and hope they call again, so I know who it is. If I don’t find out, it irks me. Then, someone mentioned an advanced Caller ID application available for free on the Android Market called, TrueCaller (with a paid version containing more features.) I jumped on this as soon as I could. I thought this was the caller ID app I was looking for.

Application: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.trueCaller.trial.eur

Description(Provided by Developer):

Who’s calling,Caller ID,Spam,Phonebook,

Twitter,Facebook,Linkedin,Eniro,Hitta

What's Stephanie up to?

Know more about the caller with TrueCaller!

When making/receving a call:
▷Display name, address, region and country
▷Display status message from Facebook or Linkedin
▷Be notified of spam callers
▷See name of prepaid cards with CallerID+!

My Views: When I was given the opportunity to review this application, I was thoroughly excited. Ever since I started networking at my university and joined a fraternity, I was getting a quite a few calls ands text messages from numbers I wasn’t familiar with. You would think that people would text message you with their name, especially if you’ve only met them once or don’t have their number.

At first, I was very satisfied with this app. It was doing exactly as it said: when I received a phone call, I would be provided with a lot of information. Sometimes this information would include just a phone number up to a complete address! This is great as it gives me practically all the information I needed to know about the caller. At the very least, it provided me with a name and number.

The other features included were also pretty awesome. If you open the application itself, you can click a button that says: “Search & History,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. On the search tab, you can find someone by typing in either a name, number, or address, but my favorite was the history tab. I like this history tab because it contains all the numbers that called or text messaged me. This is helpful because my phone isn’t always in my hands, and if there’s a number that calls me and I don’t know who it is before I call them back, I can go into my TrueCaller history, search up the number, name, and then I can decide on calling the number back. Another feature that some may find useful is being able to connect their phonebook to their favorite social networking sites. IE: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But that’s not it, you can actually update your phonebook using the TrueCaller application. It will scan the numbers in your phonebook and try to match them with a valid address. That is very helpful, but there’s a downside; it can connect some of your numbers to addresses that aren’t valid, such as old addresses or names matched with the number. This isn’t really the fault of the app though. Lastly, there’s a simple call filtering option, which is exactly what it sounds like. Here you can block specific numbers and block unknown callers, but if you want just this feature, there are standalone applications for this.

As great as this application seems, it has its flaws. Since this application uses an internet connection to get all the information about the caller or person sending the text message to you, it could take several seconds for the actual call or text message to be received by your phone. I think this is because of certain permissions this application uses. To explain it better: if someone is calling your phone, before actually ringing or receiving the text message on your phone, the TrueCaller information pop up appears and tries to gather all the information it can, and this can waste several seconds, especially if you’re on an EDGE connection. This caused me to miss some calls, very few, but nonetheless, it’s worth mentioning, especially if you’re expecting a call or text message that’s time sensitive. Other than this, there were no other flaws I could find. In reality, the application is very useful. Also, another little “feature” I recently found is that when you’re using a full screen app., like a game, and you receive a text message, you will get the TrueCaller popup displaying the contact information, along with the message text. This is great because if you’re playing a game and you don’t want to exit to check who text messaged you, the pop up will tell you. However, this could also be viewed as a negative by some people, especially if the pop up causes you to loose a life in the game, or something of the sort, but fortunately, this pop up can easily be disabled.

I would give this application a rating of 3.5/5.