Chapter 14. Simple Phone Calls

Android provides the user with several ways of starting phone calls: from the contact list, from the call history, using a dialer that displays a 12-key dialpad on the screen, etc. All of these software modules use the same application to start a phone call. Your program can initiate a phone call in the same way: by using an Intent object to ask Android's specialized telephony application to make the call. We'll cover that technique in this chapter, and take a look behind the scenes at how the process works.

In Chapter 15, we'll introduce Android classes that give you more information about telephony, such as tracking the state of the call you made.