Telemarketing calls and cold calls are annoying, but they're even worse when you get them on your mobile phone. Unfortunately, any organization that you may have done business with once has the ability to claim that is has an "existing business relationship" with you, which gives it the right to call your cell phone until you tell it not to. Even adding your number to the national Do Not Call list applies only to businesses: Charities and political campaigns still reserve the right to call you up for donations.

Telemarketing calls and cold calls are annoying, but they're even worse when you get them on your mobile phone. Unfortunately, any organization that you may have done business with once has the ability to claim that is has an "existing business relationship" with you, which gives it the right to call your cell phone until you tell it not to. Even adding your number to the national Do Not Call list applies only to businesses: Charities and political campaigns still reserve the right to call you up for donations.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you find yourself hounded by regular calls from organizations that don't leave voice-mails or won't take no for an answer, Call Control for the Blackberry may be the app for you. The app matches incoming callers against a blacklist or whitelist before your phone rings and then decides whether to pass it through to you.

Call Control is from the folks behind EveryCall.us, a crowd-sourced Web database of telemarketer numbers and other annoying organizations that call behind hidden lines, don't leave voice messages to tell you who they are, or cold call you to solicit your business. If you discover a new telemarketing number, you can add it to the community database at EveryCall.us, and Call Control will automatically check against it the next time you get a call. The developers of the app have made it very easy to report a bad number through the app on your Blackberry.

The app not only checks against the database at EveryCall.us, but also checks against a private blacklist that's stored on your Blackberry, where you can add numbers that you want to block but don't necessarily want to report to EveryCall.us (like that ex who won't let go) and a whitelist that you can add numbers to that will always ring through even if someone else adds it to the EveryCall.us list of telemarketers. The app even blocks "out of area," "private line," and "unknown number" callers, all of which are techniques that some telemarketers use to hide their numbers from recipients.

When a number is blocked, Call Control simply disconnects the call. Depending on your wireless provider, this may mean the call is just dropped entirely or routed to your voice-mail. In either case, your phone doesn't ring, and the only alert you may receive that you got a call at all is if they bother to leave you a message.

Currently Call Control is available only on the BlackBerry. It comes in two flavors: the free "Lite" version, which includes only the 100 worst spam callers from the database and allows just a one-time update from the online database; and the $8 "Pro" version that includes everything the app has to offer. The free version is clearly designed to give you a taste of the app; the full version has all the features you'll want.