• WHAT: An accurate, safe way to initiate calls from your phone by voice
• WHY: It's safer, more convenient and a lot more fun
• COST: Zero

There isn't much that I miss about my old RAZR phone. It was, admittedly, a little smaller than my iPhone (so small, in fact, that I actually remove the SIM from my iPhone and put it into my old RAZR when I go biking) and was more flexible about battery charging (almost any charger with a mini-USB plug works). Other than that, adios muchaco - I kissed it goodbye on June 29, 2007 - the day the iPhone was introduced - and never looked back.

My RAZR did have a couple of functions, though, that I really missed on shiny new iPhone that I really figured would be fixed by the next software revisions: voice activated calling and speed dialing. They weren't and the word "annoyed" wouldn't begin to describe my frustration.

Voice activated calling (I can't stand using the word "dialing" - does anyone still "dial" a phone?) should be a standard feature on every phone. In California it's the law that you must use either a speakerphone or a headset when on the phone in your car - although I see about a hundred violators every day - and with good reason… it's safer. And it stands to reason that initiating a call by speaking someone's name is safer than scrolling through an address book or even selecting it from a list of favorites on the iPhone. The speed dialing function is safe, too - on most phones you simply press a button and hold it to initiate a call. In short, for the longest time the iPhone was a great device, but lacked a couple of the most basic features of all cell phones. Now those limitations have been addressed by third-party developers with elegant, inexpensive (in many cases, free) apps that you can download to your phone in a minute and use forever.

My favorite has become "Say Who," although I've tried others that work well and have some other features - but "Say Who" is the most accurate and simple mechanism for making calls from your phone. I keep the Say Who app on my main screen just above the logo that launches the phone function so that I remember to use it. When you tap the logo and the app launches you'll have to wait 3-4 seconds before the microphone is prepared but once it is, the app functions very intuitively and quickly. There is an option that allow auto-dialing of the selected phone number which I turned on after experimenting with the app for a while to test its accuracy. After you are confident of the results - which won't take long - you'll set it up for autodial, too.

There are a couple of wonderful features in this app that I find particularly handy. For one thing, it will recognize whether you want to call someone's home, office, mobile or other number by a variety of terms. You can, for example, say, "Scott mobile," "Scott cell," "Scott cell phone" and the result will be the same - it will call Scott's cellular phone. Another feature is that if you have nicknames added in your address book, such as "Scott" for "Scott Goldman," you can speak just the nickname instead of the whole name. Also, when you've used Say Who to initiate a call, after the call is completed you are brought back to the Say Who application, making it easy to continue calling using voice recognition instead of having to repeatedly tap the application on the phone's screen like many other apps force you to do.

One of the drawbacks of this and all other voice activating applications on the iPhone is that Apple's software doesn't currently allow these functions to work with a Bluetooth headset. I find this inexcusable on Apple's part, but it's certainly not the fault of the developers. As a result, even if you are wearing a headset you will still need to hold the phone to your mouth when you use the app; it's a small annoyance but one that reduces the overall experience. There's a very cool video of how the app works here, but this is one of those cases where you should just download it (it's free) and check it out yourself.