Feminine Phone: The newest Amosu Couture (www.alexanderamosu.co.uk) iPhone 5 has its sides, rear panel and home button coated in an elegant shade of pink. It retails for £1499. This model is also available with its sides encrusted in Pink Swarovski crystallized elements for £2899. Molouk Y. Ba-Isa Saudi Gazette I was an iPhone 5 user for a week. Yesterday, I removed my SIM from the device and there's no going back. Such a course of action will come as a shock to many, but my reasoning is sound. The iPhone doesn't have an in-phone answering machine and I found that I couldn't survive without one. An in-phone answering machine is different than voicemail. The in-phone answering machine is a wonderful functionality which enables the handset owner to listen while a caller leaves an incoming message and decide whether to take the call immediately or not. The messages are stored on the handset for future playback and reference. The handset owner pays nothing for the use of the in-phone answering machine or for the retrieval of the messages. How is such functionality used? During meetings and presentations, I put my handset on silent but leave my earpiece in place. As calls come in, the in-phone answering machine automatically activates. I can hear the messages and decide if there's anything urgent that needs my attention – without making any move. There's no message to check or voicemail to retrieve. Everyone in the room thinks my attention is 100 percent on the matter at hand. During a meeting my husband can leave a message that he will be coming home an hour late – and I will hear it and mentally revise my schedule. With a presentation ongoing, my assistant will call and advise me of the answer to the fact I wanted checked, update me on my schedule, inform me on received calls and let me know someone is waiting in my office. With a couple of different projects running at the same time, people will leave messages on their progress and I can have peace of mind that schedules are being met, without looking away from the matter before me. If there is an emergency, I will learn about it immediately and can gently remove myself from the group, handle the situation and return. I have had the same telephone number for more than a decade and it has been widely shared. My in-phone answering machine lets me decide which callers to answer, which to handle later and which to ignore. Journalists get plenty of strange calls so it's essential to be able to screen callers. My mobile answering machine protects me from unpleasant callers and I have even used the recordings as evidence in a police matter. Over the years I have found the in-phone answering machine to be far more reliable than Saudi Telecom's (STC) service and as mentioned previously, it's free. Apple users in the US have good voicemail services but none of those functionalities are available in Saudi Arabia. It's easy to switch to STC voicemail if I'm getting on a plane, but otherwise, the in-phone answering machine picks up calls for me. The last week with the iPhone, my functionality was less than it should be. My response time was poor. Without an in-phone answering machine, I had to regularly remember to call the STC messaging system. That was a slow, unfriendly experience and I had to pay to hear my messages. Callers asked why I had moved away from my regular voicemail, which was so convenient. Family, friends and staff hated it that they couldn't get messages to me while scheduled events were in progress. After six days of havoc in my life, my dearest husband, who had purchased the iPhone 5, brought me a present. It was a new feature phone with an in-phone answering machine. I have researched the issue of the in-phone answering machine extensively and found that Apple doesn't offer the needed functionality due to restrictions in developers accessing the required portion of the application programming interface (API). Since Android is supposed to be open source, I couldn't understand why an in-phone answering machine hasn't been created. However, I have mentioned many times that consumers should use the technology that most efficiently and affordably meets their needs. So I'm taking my own advice. For now, I'll run apps on my tablets and the phone in my pocket will be a feature phone that helps me manage my life in a really smart way.
