Features that should be in the T-Mobile Account Management app

One of the T-Mobile devs posted in the T-Mobile G1 forums asking what features users would like to see in a T-Mobile account manager app.  Here's what I wrote:

Tim O'Reilly has some good points on his recent Radar posting about the voice-activated Google Search for iPhone that I think are relevent here:

1. Cloud integration. 

...

And that of course is the future of mobile as well. A mobile phone is inherently a connected device with local memory and processing. But it's time we realized that the local compute power is a fraction of what's available in the cloud. Web applications take this for granted -- for example, when we request a map tile for our phone -- but it's surprising how many native applications settle themselves comfortably in their silos. (Consider my long-ago complaint that the phone address book cries out to be a connected application powered by my phone company's call-history database, annotated by data harvested from my online social networking applications as well as other online sources.)

Put these two trends together, and we can imagine the future of mobile: a sensor-rich device with applications that use those sensors both to feed and interact with cloud services. The location sensor knows you're here so you don't need to tell the map server where to start; the microphone knows the sound of your voice, so it unlocks your private data in the cloud; the camera images an object or a person, sends it to a remote application that recognizes it, and retrieves relevant data. All of these things already exist in scattered applications, but eventually, they will be the new normal.

What I wanted to point out is that here is an opportunity to allow the Contacts manager on the phone to integrate w/ my T-Mobile call records, and the ability to use voice or PIN and device ID to unlock access to T-Mobile billing information.  Integrating my T-Mobile call records with my Google Contacts to annotate my calling and texting history would be pretty sweet.

 

The rest of the features mentioned here are kinda no-brainers:

Pay bill and/or add money to FlexPay,

Viewing and changing billing and account information,

View and manage all aspects of family plans, 

Viewing current and past bills,

Review and change plans, 

review, browse, and change add-ons like insurance, SMS bundles, etc, 

search and datamine call records with smart recommendations for changing myFaves contacts,  

VIew current voice, SMS, and data usage.

 Browse and order accessories,

GUI for voicemail management (tied into Google Contacts)