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My Current Setup
I make a lot of phone calls every day. The phone numbers are in an online CRM. My cell phone (iPhone 4s) sits in a cradle at my desk. I have a blue tooth earpiece connected to the iPhone. Right now, I re-type phone numbers from the web page into my iPhone and press dial. In addition to the extra typing I occasionally make typos while entering the number.
What I'm Looking For
I'd like to click on the phone number in the browser and have it dial the number on the iPhone (through the cradle USB). I'm open to bluetooth alternatives as well.
What I've Found
There are a few apps out there (like myPhoneDesktop) that integrate with the iPhone. Unfortunately they typically offer a proxy screen on your desktop where you dial the number and it calls on your cell phone. Nice, but I still end up typing numbers in all day. As a side note, most of these apps seem to require a connection to some online database to handle syncing. I don't really want an cloud account for syncing. I just want the 10 digit number to go over my USB.
I've found old posts around the Web of people asking for similar functionality but the general response was that the software did not exist.
- http://forums.webosnation.com/palm-os-devices-apps/96690-dial-phone-via-treo-650-pc-possible.html
- https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2058361?start=0&tstart=0
- http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=356491
There are solutions that will dial a phone using RS232 connection. I don't think any of these solutions fit my use case.
There were several related SU questions like A way to call someone from PC via a cellphone or How can I call from my PC?. However, I would prefer to use my iPhone and not an online service like Google Voice.
The closest thing I've found is PushDialer. Unfortunately they do not have a Windows version yet.
Has anyone come across a seemless solution? This seems like it should be a really simple intuitive use case but my searches are coming up empty.
Edit #1
The CRM I'm using renders phone numbers using a hyperlink with the tel protocol.
Rich C
Posted 2015-01-06T18:41:07.953
Reputation: 179
HappyFingersApp? Www.happyfingersapp.com? – Kinnectus – 2015-01-06T18:55:03.260
@Chris Looked at HappyFingers some time ago. Still have to type the phone number into their desktop bar. Nice product though. Slight advantage being able to do it using the PC 10key but would really like to find something that was one click. – Rich C – 2015-01-06T19:13:35.557
A problem you're going to find is that the phonebook application you use (address book, outlook, web page etc.) Will need to talk to the phone dialer app - this requires an API of some sort and if the author doesn't provide a plugin for your contact list software then nothing will work. – Kinnectus – 2015-01-06T19:20:27.773
Right now when I click on a tel: link in Firefox it opens a "Launch Application" window where it lists Skype and gives an option to choose alternates. I'm assuming it passes the phone number as a parameter when launching the selected app. You can also check a "Remember my choice" box to make your selection the default. If I could select in this dialog box a program like HappyFingers and they accepted a command-line param for the phone number, I think this would be close to ideal. And if installing their bulky DoEverything bar were optional it would probably be a perfect solution. – Rich C – 2015-01-06T21:05:35.310
The "tel" protocol is new for HTML and, mostly, only phones use it (for obvious reasons)... it's not anything "passing" the number, it's functionality written into web browsers that tell the device the link is a telephone/Skype number that it can use to call. – Kinnectus – 2015-01-06T21:24:41.487
I can see that I only implied the tel link in my question. I'll update. – Rich C – 2015-01-06T22:12:24.870
The MAILTO protocol is a good example because when you click on the hyperlink, it opens an external program that is not a plugin. It passes the email address to Outlook or some other configured program.
– Rich C – 2015-01-06T22:17:56.437