trueCall [sic] is a pretty cool way of avoiding nuisance phone calls while still letting through people you want to speak to.

It plugs into your phone line and screens all incoming calls. You tell it the numbers of your friends, family and other people who you want to speak to. Those phone numbers always ring like they did before, so no change there.

You can also put in a “zaplist” of numbers you never want to hear from. trueCall intercepts these calls and plays callers a message saying you don’t want to speak to them – without your phone ringing.

For those who dislike “number withheld” calls you can automatically block those too.

That’s neat enough, but there’s more:

With the “Whisper” mode trueCall will answer the phone before you hear it ringing and ask any unknown caller who’s there. Then it rings the phone for you and plays the reply. Once you’ve heard who’s there, you can decide whether to speak to them, record a message (it’s an answerphone as well) or play them the “I never want to speak to you again” message and block them forever.

The “Shield” mode answers the phone and plays the brilliantly direct message:

If you are family or a friend please press 5, if you are a cold caller please hang up and don’t call us again

Obviously recorded cold calls won’t press the button, and neither will telemarketers if they have any sense.

You can also configure this to happen only at night, to stop annoying phone calls at antisocial hours.

Finally, to top it off you have an internet control panel that lets you configure the device and see your call history over the web! Useful? Perhaps not, but very cool.

It’s available from their online store for just shy of £100.