Android Tutorial

By : Ketan Bhimani

406 

judiciously so as not to unnecessarily disrupt the calling

functionality of the user’s device.

Making Phone Calls

You’ve seen how to find out if the handset is ringing. Now let’s look

at how to enable your application to make phone calls as well.

Building on the previous example, which sent and received SMS

messages, we now walk through similar functionality that adds a

call button to the screen to call the phone number instead of

messaging it.

The Android SDK enables phone numbers to be passed to the dialer

in two different ways. The first way is to launch the dialer with a

phone number already entered. The user then needs to press the

Send button to actually initiate the call. This method does not

require any specific permissions. The second way is to actually

place the call. This method requires the

android.permission.CALL_PHONE

permission to be added to the

application’s AndroidManifest.xml file.

Let’s look at an example of how to enable

an application to take input in the form of

a phone number and launch the Phone

dialer after the user presses a button, as

shown in Figure.

The user can enter a phone number in

the EditText control and press the

Call button to initiate a phone call

from within the application.