One of the many great touches to the iPhone is the ease with which it handles conference calls. Here’s how we described it in our iPhone FAQ:
To initiate a conference call, make your first call as normal and then and tap the Add Call button-you can choose a person from your Address Book to call and tap Merge Calls to begin the conference.
And that’s it — just a few taps. The iPhone’s been out a week, and I know how to do a conference call; I’ve worked at Macworld for nearly eight years, and I still don’t know how to do a conference call on my office phone.
As simple as the Add Call feature is, there are limits to it, as Chris Breen and I discovered Friday when we were recording the latest episode of the Macworld Podcast. Our idea was that I would begin the podcast by calling Chris’ iPhone via Skype (all the better to record our conversation with Audio Hijack Pro. After chit-chatting a while about Chris’ impressions, we were going to have him use the Merge Call feature to dial up senior editor Dan Frakes and patch him into the podcast. Presto — a live demonstration of the power of Merge Calls.
One problem, though — you can only merge a call if you’re the one who initiated the call in the first place. Chris was able to put me on hold to call Dan, but when he hit the Merge Call button, nothing happened.
That probably shouldn’t have surprised us. The iPhone User’s Guide PDF doesn’t explicitly say you can’t merge calls if you didn’t initiate the call in the first place, but note the way the instructions start:
Start a conference call1. Make a call.
2. Tap Add Call and make another call. The first call is put on hold. If you want, you can talk on the second line privately before merging the calls.
3. Tap Merge Calls. The calls are merged onto one line and everyone can hear each other.
4. Repeat steps two and three to add more calls to the conference.
When put that way, it seems our discovery of the limits to the Merge Call button are, in fact, there and not the product of our limited imaginations.
So, so long as we’re making feature requests for future iPhones, I’ll make mine: Expand the otherwise wonderful Add Call functionality so that any iPhone user can take advantage of it, regardless of whether they made the first call.
And if you want to throw in the ability to play music for callers on hold, I wouldn’t object to that either — the silence on my end of the line while Chris was calling Dan was haunting.
Update: As you can see from the comments, perhaps Chris and I need to try this again. Commentor Slay may be on to something with Skype being the problem, though I can’t imaginge why that would be. At any rate, this certainly merits further investigation.
I have no problem merging calls that I place or receive. The trick is to wait for the second call to actually connect before tapping the merge call icon.
I don't know what what wrong for you. I just called my friend John's iPhone from my iPhone and then he added a call, and merged us to a conference call, no problem. Maybe the Skype got in your way, or maybe we had an extra iPhone advantage.
Commenting from my iPhone.
Maybe it's Skype. Maybe it's that you both were using iPhones, All I know is that when Phil called me, and I called Dan, Merge absolutely didn't work. I had both calls active and, nothing.
Yep, I just tried banding together 4 calls, all merged into one--and having started by RECEIVING the first call on the iPhone. It all worked. :)
Scared me for a second there. You made my Chapter 2 look wrong!
--Pogue
The "Phone" video under "Features" on the main iPhone page at Apple's site shows Bob merging Kate's incoming call into the call he had previously originated to John.
>Bob merging Kate's incoming call into the call he had previously originated to John.
That still doesn't give us the answer as Bob originated the call. What we'd like to see is Bob merge a call with Kate that originated with John.
OK, I have enough phone lines in hand to experiment.
1. Call from one of my lines to iPhone. Answer. Call from another line to iPhone. Hold and answer call. Merge calls.
Worked fine.
2. Call iPhone from one of my lines. Answer. "Add Call" on iPhone. Call another of my lines (from iPhone). Answer. Merge calls (on iPhone). Worked.
Those two cases plus the video plus the quoted instructions from the user guide seem to cover the cases for a three-way. (It's exciting to be able to do 5-way...I may try a four way tomorrow.)
Did anyone else notice the fine print in the ATT terms and conditions which says you can't conference while using an unlimited feature? Taken literally, that says if your plan is larger than 450 minutes, you can't conference during night and weekend hours (since you can't control whether or not the calls are charged against the unlimitedness). No problem with my 450 minute plus 5000 night and weekend plan, since 5000 night and weekend is only *effectively* unlimited.
>2. Call iPhone from one of my lines. Answer. "Add Call" on iPhone. Call another of my lines (from iPhone). Answer. Merge calls (on iPhone). Worked.
OK, that's the scenario that didn't work for us in our Phil to Chris to Dan trial. Perhaps Skype is the culprit in this case.
Not to beat a dead horse, but the very first conference call I tried was initiated by my daughter on her iPhone. She was talking to two people on it and called my iPhone. I added one more to the call.
Does anyone have more specifics about the alleged "ban" on conferencing during nights and weekends? I wonder if that is a catch-all to discourage sucking bandwidth rather than an outright ban.
-dan
danham, search down for "unlimited" in the CingularServiceSummary-.pdf file that you of course downloaded per the advice given in one of the welcome email messages.
The wording is clear. What isn't clear, due to the unformatted nature of that page of text, is whether it applies universally or to family plan only.
It's also not clear whether all of that document really applies to iPhone accounts, as there are some "oddities" elsewhere.
--John Baxter (AKA "schoonerman")
I can not make a conference call on my iPhone. I talked to Apple Support and the Apple rep called ATT and to his surprise found that, at least for the 3000 Minute Family Plan, you have to activate conference calling as a feature with ATT and pay extra for each conference call.
How about that for a sneaky, underhanded way to increase the price of the calling plan.
The phone is marketed with conference call as a standard feature. No where on the Apple or ATT site is it stated (unless it is very small print) that conference calling is an extra charge.
The Apple person says he thought conference calling was included as a standard part of the rate plan. He, very nicely, directed me to an ATT general number saying that this is a billing issue, not a technical issue.
I looked at ATT's Terms and Conditions
http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/articles-resources/iphone-terms.jsp
and it only talks about Conference Calling under Unlimited Voice Services and the Family Plan with 3000 minutes is not an unlimited plan, at least if you define what the word unlimited by the definition in the dictionary. In addition, there are lots of superfluous things in the iPhone Terms, such as the section on Blackberry.
I answered an incoming call and then got another call from a friend so I put the first on hold and anwered the second and then hit merge. It fried my sim card so that it is running the call forward and waiting settings so that the phone is jammed and no longet works.