I have a few ideas on how to enhance the UI/UX of smartphones, but most of them are too low-level to be made into apps.<p>To get an idea of the sort of things I'm thinking about, take a feature that is now in many phones: personalized ringtones for different people in your address book. The first person who had that idea could not turn it into an app, since almost no phone I know of gives access to such low-level API to developers (i.e. trigger event when phone call comes in, inform the app of the number calling, and allow overriding the default ringtone)<p>These things are quite straightforward for the device/OS makers (iPhone, Android, etc) to implement but that functionality is not usually exposed in the public API.<p>So, given an idea like the above, is there a way to capitalize on it?<p>For example, one could:<p>a) Patent the idea and wait, hoping that some company will one day implement it.<p>b) Patent the idea and approach companies to add to their mobile device / OS<p>c) Other?<p>Any thoughts? Are such things even patentable (e.g. the personalized ringtone mentioned above) ? Any other ways to capitalize on these sorts of ideas?
Android and Windows Mobile give you very liberal access to low-level functionality of the OS. Windows Mobile in particular, despite all its faults, is a very flexible OS as far as what developers can do. For example, there is an app on Windows Mobile that intercepts incoming calls and does a web lookup on the phone number to display the name, address, age, and known associates of the caller.<p>You could likely do anything you can think of with one of those, and use that as leverage to get other companies to allow you access to their OS's.