callwave

Yesterday Jason Langridge posted an item about a service called callwave that will replace your cell phone carrier's voice mail with callwave's voice mail system. I decided to give it a try.

The switch over is simple:

1. Sign up for a free account here.
2. Enter the code given for your cell phone provider and technology. For GSM users like myself use *004*17756651234*11#, this code tells the GSM switches to transfer a call when there is no answer (Call Forward Conditional).
3. Dial your phone number from your cell phone, to set up the voice mail.

What are the pros of using callwave:

• Voice mails can be emailed as attachments to you.
• A Vista gadget is available to display your voice mails on your PC.

• The pro feature allows you to screen your calls.
• The pro feature allows you to call back the person who left the voice mail or send them an SMS message.
• An additional feature provides fax to email capability.

What are the cons of using callwave:

• It uses forwarding minutes on my T-Mobile plan both for persons leaving voice mails and for me checking voice mails.
• I do not get notified on my cell phone that a voice mail is waiting. I have the option for callwave to send an email and/or text message to my cell phone.
• No integration with Outlook, other than email reception.
• Does not handle multiple numbers to one voice mail box. This is probably the feature I want the most. I have a Sunrocket VOIP line and a T-Mobile line. I use the Sunrocket Find Me feature to my T-Mobile line after 4 rings. I have also turned off my Sunrocket voice mail (which has email and call screening) so that all of my unanswered calls are handled by my T-Mobile voice mail. All of my unanswered calls go to one place, but T-Mobile does not currently have the email and call screening features. It is a no win situation right now; hopefully it will be remedied in the future with T-Mobile's UMA feature which will merge my VOIP and cell lines together.

Comments

[Jay Brewer]

I'm having nothing but issues with my TMOBILE MDA and batteries. I've gone through 2 now and they both won't charge after being discharged. Any ideas? Any idea how to get it back up and running?

[Stephen Skarlatos]

Are you using the original charger? I had a problem with third party chargers when the battery was fully discharged, they never seem to be able to perform a full charge.

[Roscoe Brooks]

The Gadget works great on 32-bit versions of Vista but if you’re running 64-bit Vista, there’s a problem: it will not play any voicemails. CallWave doesn’t seem to have any information on this problem, but I did some research and discovered a fix, which I posted on my (very) new blog.