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No more late-night drunk texts to your ex.
Smartphones give us access to a lot of people and information at any time from just about anywhere in the world. In the hands of a sober, sensible mind, it’s a wonderfully useful tool. In the hands of someone drunk out of their gourd, it’s little else but a source of potentially catastrophic embarrassment. Some clever coders have been trying to develop a digital solution to the ancient fear of drunk-dialing someone, but one phone manufacturer is looking to be a little more proactive about it.
Gree Electronics is a Chinese smartphone manufacturer that’s pretty low on the totem pole compared some of the more prolific brands. Nevertheless, the lack of notoriety presents opportunities to innovate, which is why they’ve patented an interesting new development for their line of phones: Drunk Mode.
In a nutshell, when you turn on your phone’s Drunk Mode, the activation of certain apps would be limited. You would customize this yourself in a separate rules menu in case you want to disable some apps, but not all of them. In addition to these rules, you would also need to establish a “sobriety verifier,” a little test you’d need to pass in order to prove you have full control of your faculties. You can’t disable drunk mode without passing the sobriety verifier, so even if you’re just barely lucid enough to open your settings, you won’t be able to use your locked apps until you’re completely clear.
Since they’re such a small brand, the notion probably won’t become commonplace any time soon, but it is a good sign that manufacturers are considering little contingencies like that. Nobody likes receiving drunk texts from their friends at 2 AM.
