A Google employee by the name of Attila Bodis has taken to Google+ to announce an awesome new feature that’ll come to Android at some point early next year. If you connect your phone number to Google+, and you call someone who has an Android phone, even if they don’t have your phone number in their address book, they’ll see your profile photo. To put it another way, Google+ will enhance the dialer experience thanks to its database of user submitted images.

Now this isn’t exactly a new concept. When you install Facebook on your phone, it’ll automatically give the contacts in your address book that you’re also friends with a photo. But again, what Google is doing will already be baked into the platform, and it’ll also work for complete strangers.

What are the pros and cons of this? Obvious pro is that it’ll be easier to accept calls from people who don’t know if you can see who is calling. Obvious con is that you have to give your phone number to Google. That might not be such a bad thing, because Google can use your phone number to add an authentication layer to your Google account, but some people might be creeped out.

There’s also the whole Google+ isn’t as popular as Google would like it to be thing. I don’t use Google+ personally, neither do any of my close friends. Everyone is on Facebook or Twitter, for obvious reasons.

Can this called ID feature convince people to sign up to G+?

We’ll have to wait and see.

It’s also not clear if you’ll need Android 4.4 for this to work, because Samsung, HTC, Sony, everyone really, they write their own dialer applications. Will Google put their own dialer app in the Play Store?