T-Mobile Unmasks Mystery Mobile Callers

T-Mobile, using technology from a company called Cequint, is offering a new Caller ID service that includes names—a mobile first in the United States.

Image: Cequint

When someone you know calls your smartphone, a name, a number, and possibly a photo pops up on your display. The names of unknown callers have been a mobile mystery, but maybe not anymore.

Today, T-Mobile is launching a caller ID feature that will reveal the city and state and even the name of the unknown caller, making it the first among the four major mobile carriers in the United States to offer the latter. (Verizon offered a city and state ID feature in 2008.) The company is charging an extra $3.99 per month for the optional "Name ID" service, which will also allow users to store the new name in their contacts list with a click.

To provide the feature, T-Mobile partnered up with Seattle-based Cequint, which specializes in caller ID technology. It will be available on T-Mobile’s new Android-based Samsung Exhibit smartphones and expanded to other devices, including the myTouch 4G slide, later this month. It will become a standard feature offered for all T-Mobile phones in the future.

"It's so simple—it's not sexy, it's not cool, it's not a videogame, but it could be one of the best additions to mobile," said Cequint CEO Rick Hennessey in a statement.

And it means that landlines, already in declining use, lose one of their few remaining pieces of allure.

If you’re wondering why naming ID hasn’t been available in the past, it’s not for lack of demand. A 2008 Forrester Research paper commissioned by VeriSign showed that 96 percent of survey respondents said they screen their calls, and 59 percent wanted caller IDs on their mobiles back then, although most wouldn’t pay more than $4 a month for it. But providing the service is technically complicated, so it seems that carriers wanted to make sure it was worth their while before they offered it.

As CNN points out. there’s one stumbling block for T-Mobile’s big reveal. A key rival—Verizon Wireless—withholds the name of its subscribers, so a T-Mobile phone user who gets a call from a Verizon customer will still be in the dark.

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