By www.mountainviewcellphones.com 2/20/2010

The Blackberry has a great visual voicemail system. I was wondering whether Blackberry had caught up in this arena to the IPhone. To my pleasant surprise, it has to a great extent.

The Blackberry App World is delivering “VALUE.”

YouMail is a great application for visual voicemail. What it provides is a great way screen and go thru your voicemail outside of the traditional IVR (interactive voice response) system. This makes the phone more usable and faster for the user to check messages and address the most urgent messages first without wading thru unimportant messages to get the critical one. Best of all, the application is FREE.

There is a paid transcription service that will convert the audio voicemail into text for your viewing. This is the hook so to speak of the application. Now you can easily view your audio voicemails and respond via text or thru audio, (go even faster).

I could not find the feature to replay certain parts of the audio voicemail, but the transcription process can eliminate a key step in the world of voice mail…finding pen and paper to write down a number. It’s done for you in much more elegant way, and you can easily share this electronically without typing it in again. There are also automated responses on the menu so you can quickly respond to the message.

Is it as elegant as the IPhone interface, no. Does it get the job done at $500 per year less, yes. I mean, you can have a Blackberry and a flat screen TV for the price of 1 IPhone. What’s the value equation here?

Anyway, Blackberry App World is real and producing real useful apps. Although the number of applications are not as wild as the Apple or Android communities, the quality is definitely there for applications you will use more than once or twice.

Sprint currently has a promotion for Blackberries that we are offering. $300 in credits for businesses that decide to activate 3+ or more Blackberry devices with us. Yes, you get $300 in credits for signing up for a 2 year contract, must port in numbers from other carriers. Write or more importantly, call us if you are interested.

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