Wednesday, October 31, 2007

PhoneGnome introduces new Mobile Web with Visual Voicemail


PhoneGnome today announced a new Mobile Phone version of their VoIP service. The new "Mobile Web" service lets us use our PhoneGnome accounts directly on our mobile phone web browser. Key features are:
(1) It doesn't require any downloads or installation of software. (2) You don't need high-speed data plan. (3) Visual Voicemail for (almost) any phone. (4) It's free.

They appear to have worked pretty hard to ensure the service works on more mobile phones than many other mobile phone apps that usually require a high-end smartphone, such as a Blackberry or Treo. I tried the service on an old Motorola V60 (monochrome 96 x 64 screen) which only supports WAP/WML 1.0 and it worked fine (despite the phone's clunky limitations). It looks great on Samsung T639.

Visual Voicemail


The PhoneGnome Mobile Web service provides access to your PhoneGnome Premium Voicemail directly on your phone. You can bookmark the voicemail page to get to it faster (maybe as few as 2 clicks, depending on the phone and how easy it is to call up bookmarks).

If you only have one voicemail, it's probably faster to call in and retrieve it the old-fashioned way. But if you have a number of pending messages, that's when the Visual Voicemail aspect really shines. You can see the list of messages, with caller details, time/date etc. and click to listen to just a specific message. Pretty slick.

PhoneGnome says the service works with any cell phone. It requires at least a basic Internet web browser and associated web surfing plan ($5.99/mo T-zones, for instance). Most phones sold in the last few years have at least a basic browser capability that would probably work with this service and more and more basic phone plans are including at least limited web access (since they sold you a phone that supports it, many people sign up for a plan that includes browsing).