Hi All,

I had an idea the other day for my Nokia N900. As I live in Australia and there are very costly fines for using your phone while driving, there should be better way of getting sms's read to you without handling the phone. I was thinking something like this, your phone receives an SMS, phone checks for BT connectivity (if its not connected over BT to something, then it wouldn't read the SMS to you, as you probably wouldnt be in your car). If it has BT, then it uses the voice synthisizer to "read" the sms to you. Obviously there would be implications in this, potentially having a sms read to you while having other people in the car with you could have bad consequences, as the message at hand may not be their business. I suppose that could be another feature, when the SMS is receieved, phone will pause music and say "Message receieved from <sender> reading in 10 seconds", giving you time to fumble for your phone and kill it if you need to.

Anyway this is my first post on brainstorm, so please go easy on me if I've posted wrong.

It is interesting. I would suggest improving it a little further:

Add a configurable voice synthesizer to read everything that arrives in conversations. You could configure what engine to use (espeak, for example) and how it would be sued: speaker, bluetooth, what contacts, and so on.

@lewwy
By the way, create a Brainstorm and put a link to this post there. Then edit you first post and put a link to the brainstorm here.

I like how symbian does it: you have to press a button on the phone to start reading unread messages. (symbian will read both mails and SMS/MMS)

now we don't have a hardware button for this on the phone, but we have one on the BT equipment usually. so what could happen is:
sms comes in. application starts playing an audio fila saying "SMS received" and goes into "pause" mode - you press the button that you usually use on your BT device to toggle between pause and play to continue reading (and pause again).