You may ask yourself what the heck is CallShield (CS) and what does it do for me and my Treo. Well, I was able to get a sneak peek at CS version 2, and from what I can tell, this software is a must have for your Treo as it provides phones answering services directly on the Treo.


CS works as your personal answering service for both voice and SMS and unlike human intervention services, this one does what you tell it to do. It's very easy to setup and very flexible in the options.


Once you have CS installed, you have seven days to register. Seven days is a relatively short trial period, but after you setup a couple rules like having the office calls go directly to voicemail, you'll be hooked.


To setup a new rule, simply click “New” and you will be presented a very easy to understand menu. CS has a manual to provide a little more detail on particular items, but for the most part everything is self explanatory. Some of the basic options are to refuse a call, hangup, go direct to voicemail and answer as normal. In my test, I found that when a call was directed to voicemail, the treo answered the call very briefly and then dropped back into standby mode. This to me is acceptable as the services offered by CS are executed on the Treo, not the airwaves. Also, if you have the call setup to go to voicemail, one would also presume you do not need a sound, thus you never know the call came in…unless you're watching it like I was.


A couple more options in answering the phone are “Announce & hangup” and “Announce & Talk”. These simply do as they say. If you're a social butterfly and like to have the world know what you're doing, then “Announce & Talk” is for you. This option will answer the phone for you so intervention on your part is not needed. Seriously, this could be useful when you expecting a call while driving as you should be concentrating on the road, or when you're working in the garden and don't want to worry about wiping your hands to answer the phone.


The other cool thing about CS is that fact that you can assign sounds to each rule you setup. The treo by default allows you to do this in a limited fashion from within the favorite's buttons, but you're limited to only 50 contacts. I don't know about you, but I don't use all 50 blocks of favorites because it takes me longer to scroll the favorites vs just typing in the number. Well, CS to the rescue…


CS offers a wide range of alert options. There all listed under the “Sounds” tab. I like to poke fun at this because even though the treo vibration is noisy, thus is a sound, I haven't heard the LED yet ;) Anyway, the sound options allow you to choose midi, MP3, vibrate and LED. Pretty much all self explanatory and all work well.


Now back to the Treo favorite's replacement. If you don't use categories for your contacts, you should, as this makes it quick and easy to setup some rules…depending on your needs. For instance, if you have some categories for Family, Work, Beer drinking buddies, etc, you can set a certain sound to alert each time any of the people in that particular category call you. I like “it's five-O-clock somewhere” for my drinking buddies :wacko: One thing to note is that currently you need to place your MP3's in the /audio directory on your SD card. The developer told me they would make this directory user selectable in the next upgrade. If you don't want to use categories, never fear as CS will let you go crazy and set a tone for everyone in your contact list. Now this isn't a complete replacement for the favorites as CS doesn't dial anyone from the contact list, it only lets you know whose calling by the select sound option you chose.


CS also allows you to set pretty much all the same rules used in phone calls for SMS calls. I've heard that in Japan there getting spam by SMS. I haven't seen this problem yet in the U.S., but CS certainly will keep things under control.


In addition to all the options available to you to block or redirect calls, you may find the need to only run these rules at certain times of the day i.e. in church, at the movies or that weekly meeting with the boss. CS built in a schedule that can be applied to each rule. The schedule offers selectable days and hours making it easy to setup those weekly times where you don't want interruptions.


The support you get from the developer is Great too. As they were generous enough to provide me a beta copy for this review, I returned the favor and provided them with a couple of comments of which they immediately addressed. I've comment to other developers before only to have the email go unanswered. So if you have questions or comments, know that the folks at mantragroup will help you out.