mBox brings visual voicemail to Aussie iPhones

Adam Turner
Wednesday, 17 September 2008 13:37

IT Industry - Market

Australian iPhone owners can now have an inbox-like view of their voicemail thanks to mBox's handy iPhone app.
The lack of visual voicemail in Australia is one of the big disappointments with the local version of the iPhone. If local telcos offered it, it would reduce the temptation to import cheap iPhones and hack them to run on Australian networks. Australian voicemail specialist mBox now offers a solution.

mBox is a messaging service offering fax to email and voicemail to email. I've been using it for almost 18 months, with my work number forwarding to my mBox number and then mBox forwarding voicemail messages to me as an email WAV attachment. Pricing starts from $10 per month and incoming numbers are available in various regions of Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the US.

The call forwarding also costs me a few cents every time someone rings me - but I receive very few calls so I don't mind. My voicemail message basically says, "Hi, you've rung Adam - bugger off and send me an email". It seems to do the trick. I try to avoid faxes like the plague but, in an emergency, I can give out the mBox number as a fax number.

Anyway, mBox has released a free iPhone 2.x app that lets you view your fax and voicemail messages as if they were an incoming email. It doesn't download the entire message automatically, just the sender's phone number and the time the message was received. You can click on a message to play it, with a big green Call Back button if you want to return their call. You can also view faxes as PDFs.

Of course it's not true visual voicemail for the iPhone, in that you can't view voicemail messages left by people calling your iPhone (I thought I'd tell you that up front rather than getting up your hopes for several pages). You could always forward your iPhone to your mBox number, but that could start to get expensive. It is however a very handy way of keeping track of your voicemail when you're away from your desk.

The mBox icon on your iPhone's home screen displays the number of unread messages, just like the Mail icon. The biggest disappointment is that it doesn't offer a push option, so you're not automatically notified when a new message is received - you have to launch the app the manually check for messages. Of course you can always cobble together a work-around. Here's how I did it. CONTINUED