Showing posts with label Forwarding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Forwarding. Show all posts

Tuesday, 12 July 2016

Put an end to manually forwarding your calls!



For those of you who have a 3G version of the Gear S2 and don't want to fuss with manually call forwarding anymore, allow me to recommend an option many seem to have forgotten over the last couple of years: Google Voice

I've been using GV for years as the VM on my phone. Now, I have added the Gear S2 3G as another phone on my GV account. This gives two great benefits:

1. Calls automatically forward from phone-to-watch OR watch-to-phone if I don't answer on the originally called device, eliminating the need to enable and disable call forwarding phone-to-watch manually and giving a two-way solution if I leave the watch at home for a change.

2. Gives one unified voicemail box for both my phone and watch numbers. While only a few important people have my watch number for emergency purposes, I don't want people to have to remember multiple numbers to call or worry they are leaving a VM in the "box I rarely check."

To forward the watch's calls, just follow Google Voice's instructions with the manual call forwarding dial codes for your carrier (T-Mobile USA is **004*1<10digitGVnumber>#, for example) and dial them on your watch AFTER you set the number up in your GV account. And, of course, this is only going to work for those who live in a country GV services (US & Canada, I believe). If you are outside the US & Canada, I'm sorry that I have no similar alternative to offer you.



Tuesday, 5 July 2016

Automatic Call Forwarding: SOLVED



Answering a question no one asked but functionality I was after.

Borne of a good post on Reddit if your Android Wear watch is hijacking your bluetooth so your phone won't connect to your cars handsfree:
https://www.reddit.com/r/hwatch/comm...adset_profile/

It's a good app and works well for me.

Got me to thinking whether it could be adapted to automatically forward calls to my phone when out of bluetooth range and back to the phone's voicemail when connected via BT. The problem with the inbuilt call forward function is that when you turn it off it erases all the forwarding options including to the phone's voicemail. What the phone's option to turn off/on the forwarding does is send an MMI code to the cell network to update the forwarding options - the same can be done by just entering them numerically.

The list of MMI codes on wikipedia makes it a versatile tool:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_forwarding#Europe

Using the Reddit post as a guide I created 2 flows:
1) Forward to voicemail on BT connect -> Trigger: BT device connected (Urbane) -> Action: Call number *004*[voicemail number]#
2) Forward to Urbane on BT disconnect -> Trigger: BT device disconnected (Urbane) -> Action: Call number *004*[watch number]#

Works really well, so if I walk out of BT range the phone forwards calls to the watch if busy/unanswered etc and back to voicemail once back in range.

Hope this is of use to someone.