But I can access it from my phone if I want to, by logging into my webmail through the phone’s browser, and then listening to the voicemail that way. Unfortunately it’s a bit more involved that the iPhone’s much more elegant solution, but there’s nothing stopping other phone manufacturers and mobile network operators from providing that service on their next generation of phones.

Alternatively the network could simply record the voicemail as an mp3 an email a link to your phone. Connected to a 3G or 3.5G network, the tiny voicemail mp3 file could just be pushed to your phone as an email, or listened to live after clicking a link in a text message. As the message is from your network provider, there is no need for them to charge full data rates to access it. They’d only do that if they wanted to, which could well be the case for revenue purposes.

If visual voicemail becomes a standard feature of mobile network operators, I don’t see what’s stopping the iPhone from being sold as a network-free, unlocked device. Just buy it and use it with any provider you want. And if you had to put up with linear voicemail but get everything else the iPhone offers, so you could get an unlocked iPhone I can’t see too many people being terribly worried about that, as the visual voicemail feature is something that surely everyone will copy.

In any case you can be sure that Apple counted on network opposition from the moment they decided to go exclusively with Cingular in the US, so this reason doesn’t seem to make too much sense to me. There’ll certainly be networks in other countries chomping at the bit to do a deal with Apple, especially if it excludes their competitors, so while there’ll be network opposition, there will also be network support.

So what about reason number 3? This one is also silly, as my reasons clearly explain. Read onto the last page for the conclusion!