YouMail visual voice mail iPhone app gets pushy
This activities ribbon is a welcome addition to YouMail on iPhone.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)We're big fans of visual voice mail, which lets you view, and then listen to, your voice mail messages in any order you'd like, not just chronologically. It's even better when that service is free (voice-to-text transcriptions, however, are typically extra). To that end, we were happy to see that YouMail's visual voice mail app for iPhone updated on Thursday, getting features such as push notification, and a new activities ribbon that lets you reply to and forward messages. You can also now organize messages by folders.
In addition, YouMail 1.5 includes a feature for toggling between speaker and handset mode, the ability to switch on automatic message playing (in the Settings), and long-awaited slide-to-delete functionality for messages. The revised app also adds the fun, but minor feature of shaking the iPhone to refresh the screen.
Sadly, YouMail 1.5 constantly crashed on us in the first 15 minutes of use, even after several reboots. It seems to have stabilized now, so it could have been a mild case of iPhone indigestion.
YouMail Visual Voicemail for iPhone competes with visual voice mail services like Google Voice, which is in beta, which does not have a dedicated iPhone app, and which offers an iPhone Web experience that my colleague Rafe Needleman gently referred to as "a load of crap."
What do you think of the new YouMail, of Google Voice, or of visual voice mail in general? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Jessica Dolcourt reviews the latest and greatest smartphone apps, in addition to a healthy dose of Windows software. E-mail Jessica and follow her on Twitter. 
Luckily, my copy of GV Mobile (one of the third-party Google Voice apps that was retracted by Apple from the App Store) still works and has visual voicemail. No bells or whistles since the developer was sadly never given the chance to improve that functionality.
Sad that Apple keeps spewing B.S. excuses about "duplicate functionality" on Google Voice apps when there are thousands of apps in the App Store that duplicate native iPhone/iPod touch functionality.
While Push notifications are nice-to-have, they're not really necessary as you can configure YouMail to send you a text message for both message notification and hang-up calls (either/or). Push being puts a huge load on my 3GS battery, so I never have it on...
As good as YouMail is, hopefully you'll never need tech support -- while it supposedly exists, I've tried to get assistance a few time and never did hear back from them...
I'm sure Cnet has detailed site analysis reports that show that iPhone articles score much higher than BlackBerry/Palm Pre/Google Android articles.
Just because you don't feel it's worthy doesn't mean the rest of the world feels the same. Don't be a narcissist, just enjoy the articles here or...move to a different news site, perhaps?
No reason to force your opinions--although perfectly normal to have them--onto others is there?
I originally went to YouMail last year so I could email my voicemail messages to others (I'm a road warrior, so I need to be able to get info to others)... customized VM messages added some fun too... but then GV came along w/ its universal number and call to connect features... so I am using both right now. I won't be able to go to GV completely until I can do the call to connect feature from an iphone app. Bottom line, too many times, people just dial me back on the number I just called from (usually my cell).
- by Tech Diva XXX October 16, 2009 2:49 PM PDT
- OOPS!! I thought it was an actual iTunes app, until I clicked on the link. Sorry my mistake.
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- by Tech Diva XXX October 16, 2009 2:53 PM PDT
- So the "Download Now" link DOES take you into iTunes. So it IS an iTunes app which is what I thought at first, so my question above still stands. How did this get approved?
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