I discovered a nice little app called CallFilter by Velocity Software recently. A lot of folks were raving about it on message boards and blogs so I thought I’d try it out and give a quick review of what I thought of it after using the (limited) demo they make available. Let me preface this by saying that I’m a big fan of screening calls and being able to know who is calling and from where. I need something that can do distinctive ringtones; I was previously using mring on my 600 and had removed it from my 650 because I felt it was to limiting by forcing me to use mp3’s only as ringtones, preventing the use of midi. Callfilter can use both, but that it but the tip of the iceberg. Being familiar with firewall rules and ACLs the structure that the callfilter uses made sense to me, it allows for rules to be created based on different criteria. It can filter certain callers right to voicemail, pick up and hang up on them or send a sms message reply to the number. It can speak the phone number to you, it can take action based on sms messages (this is very cool). It can lock your treo based on an SMS message (useful if lost). The list is huge, it’s a very feature-rich app. One unique feature is the ability to open a notes page after a call has ended, I find this very handy since I’m always forgetting important stuff after a call.

The things i had some issues with:

I had a weird problems where my phone rang continuously and I had to reset it to get out of the “loop”. I don’t know if it was callfilter related or not.

I couldn’t really test it’s full capabilities since I was limited to 5 rules (and 10 days)

I was unable to make the “reply with sms” work when call was set to “phone call was ignored + From a contact”.

Not so much an issue as it was intesting:

“Send to voicemail” seems to just ignore the call as opposed to going right to VM, the call rings as many times as set to (on the calling end) and then goes to VM.

I did _not_ read the entire manual and at the time of this writing have not looked into the “reply with sms” I saw. There is also a very active forum at mytreo.net

Overall I think this app is extremely useful, it also has an almost cult like following. It’s pricetag of $29.95 was a little of a sticker shock to me (I still have not actually purchased it) but with all it does I think it’s worth it.