🚀 go-pugleaf

> In the case of the 'touch tone' example, the '*' key was being used to end
> voice input.  It was not a situation where the key was being used as a
> deliminer between digits, or as a 'shift' key to choose the desired meaning 
> of the digits.  As such, wouldn't it have been just as easy to use the '0' 
> key in this situation?

Perhaps, but if the designer is used to systems that use the '*' or '#' keys,
it probably would never have occurred to use the '0'.

> A few years ago when I was buying my phone, it was the ONLY pulse/tone phone 
> I could get for less then $75 (it's a $25 phone).  This phone used the '*' 
> key as a 'mute' button, and the '#' key for the memory dialer.  While it 
> could have been designed with additional buttons for these features, it 
> wasn't.  (I've noticed the same thing in a lot of pulse/tone switchable 
> phones.)  Should I have forked over $50 extra, just to maintain possible 
> compatability in the future?

I've been using touch-tone entry systems (through my banks) for at least
10 years, and they've always used '*' and '#'.  If you get a touch-tone
phone and special options, such as call waiting or call forwarding, any
special options use the '#' key.  The people who designed them were expecting
you to use a standard touch-tone phone, and they shouldn't be designing
their systems to use only a subset, just because some phone manufacturers
decided to use the 'unused' keys for something else.  Would you buy a PC
compatible that had a keyboard that generated different codes for ALT-<key>,
just because MS-DOS didn't use any ALT-<key> strokes (ok, so it does, this
is just an analogy)?  Would you complain to software companies because your
non-compatible PC didn't work with their software?  I wouldn't buy a 
touch-tone phone that doesn't have working '*' and '#'.  Or, if I did, I
wouldn't use it when I knew I might need the '*' and '#'.

Bruce