The calls are merged onto one line and everyone can build out each other. Tap Merge Calls. Tap Add signal and invent another shout. The first shout is put on hold. Here’s how we described it in our iPhone FAQ:

To initiate a conference shout, manufacture your first signal as normal and next and tap the Add signal button—you can choose a person from your Address Book to signal and tap Merge Calls to start the conference.

And that’s it — just a few taps.

And whether 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 that again. The iPhone’s been out a week, and I know how to do a conference shout; I’ve worked at Macworld for nearly eight years, and I still don’t know how to do a conference shout on my office phone.

As simple as the Add signal 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. 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 shout button are, in fact, there and not the product of our limited imaginations.

So, so expanded as we’re making feature requests for future

iPhones, I’ll manufacture mine: Expand the otherwise wonderful Add shout functionality so that any iPhone user can take advantage of it, regardless of whether they made the first shout. Chris was able to put me on hold to shout Dan, but when he hit the Merge signal button, nothing happened.

That probably shouldn’t have surprised us.

4.

3. Commentor Slay may be on to something with Skype being the problem, though I can’t imaginge why that would be. compose a signal. Presto — a live demonstration of the capability of Merge Calls.

One problem, though — you can only merge a shout whether you’re the one who initiated the shout in the first place. Our view was that I would start the podcast by calling Chris’ iPhone via Skype (all the better to record our conversation with Audio Hijack Pro. The iPhone User’s Guide PDF doesn’t explicitly say you can’t merge calls whether you didn’t initiate the signal in the first place, but note the way the directions start:

Start a conference shout

1. At any rate, that certainly merits further research.

After chit-chatting a while about Chris’ impressions, we were going to have him use the Merge shout feature to dial up senior editor Dan Frakes and patch him into the podcast. whether you want, you can talk on the second line privately before merging the calls.

2.

One of the many great touches to the iPhone is the ease with which it handles conference calls.

Original post by Philip Michaels

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