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:
- Sign up for a free account here.
- 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).
- 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.
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?
Posted by: Jay Brewer | March 07, 2007 at 09:08 PM
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.
Posted by: Stephen Skarlatos | March 08, 2007 at 09:51 AM
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.
Posted by: Roscoe Brooks | March 16, 2007 at 05:49 PM