YouMail - VoiceMail Transcription - Expensive But Worth It

I have lots of digital era pet peeves. Phone books are one of them. I came home from work yesterday to find this giant yellow dead tree sitting at my door step. Horrible. Who uses those things anymore? Another is junk mail, for a lot of the same reasons. Please, make it stop. One more, and the focus of this post, is listening to voicemails. I've been horrible for years. Caller ID was the death of voicemails for me. I see who called, and call them right back, rarely (OK never) listening to their message. I tried leaving a VM recording asking people to text me instead of leaving a voicemail, but that only pissed off my doctor and auto mechanic. There have been a few transcription services for the iPhone that never quite made it. I recently did some more investigating on VM transcription services, and came across YouMail. You install the app, and to configure it, you basically allow it to hijack the voicemail from your carrier, and redirect callers to the YouMail servers. Overall the app is pretty easy to use, and gives you lots of VM management features not available on the iPhone (folder, archives, forwarding, etc. . .). I tried the transcription service for the 1 week trial, and loved it. My biggest gripes are the cost and pricing tiers (which go hand in hand!). The saver package provides 20 transcriptions a month and only transcribes the first 20 seconds of the message for $5/month or $55/year. The unlimited package transcribes unlimited VMs of unlimited length for a whopping $40/month or $450/year. That's as much as some cell minute packages. I went for the plus package that transcribes the first 60 seconds of 100 messages a month. Still pricey, but I bit the bullet, and with a discount code, it cost me $180 for the year. Pricey, but worth it if you hate listening to voicemail.

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iPhone Enterprise Dev Program Gets a Little Looser

Recently Apple was in the news (amongst a million other reasons) for loosening restrictions on iPhone developers. It mostly focused on allowing developers to use third party tools to compile code prior to building the application. This had been the case originally, then Apple stated that you could only use the iPhone SDK (software development kit), then recently retracted that.
A while back we had applied to join the iPhone Enterprise Developer Program. We wanted to be able to develop apps that we could distribute internally without having to go through the App Store. We were rejected because one of the criteria was company size. You needed to have 500 employees to be eligible, and we are a few years (at least) away from that. Today I got a call from Apple letting me know that the restriction based on number of employees has been lifted. Enterprise Developer Program, here we come!

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iPhone Related stress

If you've been dropping a lot of call lately, don’t be alarmed! You’re not alone! The average dropped call rate for the iPhone is around 30% in some areas. Those of you with scores closer to 20% should consider yourselves lucky according to Apple Geniuses! AT&T has assured its customers that they are working hard to make their service more reliable, but dropping a third of your calls just ain't right.

Don’t jump the iPhone ship just yet, there is a silver lining! Several service related problems have been traced back to the phone itself which means there might be hope for a few of you yet. If you take your phone into the Apple store they can measure your rate of dropped calls and If its higher than “Apple’s magic cutoff point“, you can get yourself a new phone!

We here in IT love the iPhone , well most of us anyways (Tyson). If your iPhone is dropping more than half of your calls, take it in to the Apple store and have them take a look at it. It might save you from cursing and screaming (Tyson).

Happy dialing my fellow iPhone users!

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iPhone Audio recognition

Wow! I would like to see this in action.
http://ericasadun.com/?p=126

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iSucker

It all started last Thursday. I was going rafting with my family down on the Arkansas River. I was running late and almost missed the shuttle to the put in point for the raft trip. In my hurry I pulled my phone out of my pocket to leave it in my car during the trip. I dropped it on the hard rocky ground. I turned it off then on again, but I could already tell the phone was acting up. The clock was 10 hours off and the audio quality sounded like there was a blown speaker. The phone was functional overall but it was time for a replacement. Fast forward to last night. I'm meeting a friend and his mom at the mall for dinner. I arrived a little early so I figured I would pop over to the Apple Store to check things out. The store was abuzz but it was far from packed. I walked right up to one of the many hands-on iphone displays. I picked up the phone and played with it for about 2 minutes. . .camera, ipod, phone, browser. Wow, the interface was unbeatable. Everything it was hyped up to be. Nothing else before it even comes close in terms of simplicity and elegance. I decided right then and there to buy one. No line, no wait, no hassle. I just walked right up to an Apple 'Genius' (one can not underestimate the looseness of this term) and said I'd like to buy an iPhone. I confirmed that the only difference between the 4g and 8g is the capacity. The iPod capabilities are secondary to me (maybe even tertiary) so I went with the smaller capacity. He rang me up and I walked out of the story. It was that easy.

I went to have dinner with my good friend Disco Bret (he will soon be a guest author on this blog) and his mom. He had just gotten his iPhone via pre-order and was playing (obsessing) with it over dinner. He was demonstrating all the cool functions for his mom. I commented "My old Tmobile MDA has all the same functionality, but it does not do any of it with the sheer elegance and simplicity of the iPhone." Bret went on about how he had spent all day trying to sync his Outlook data with his iPhone. But I'll let him discuss that in detail.

I got home from dinner and began playing (obsessing) with my iPhone. The box was typical Apple minimalism. Casing, a little cardboard, a few manuals, and a screen cloth. The first steps were to port my number, activate the phone, and sign up for service. This and all other iPhones syncing is done through iTunes. I plugged in the phone to the computer and it was recognized immediately (of course). The first step in the activation was number porting. I was a tmobile customer so I needed to port my number over as to ATT. I entered all my details and got an error that my number could not be ported. Sh**! I called ATT and after waiting on hold for a while and getting transferred between incapable hands I was told that my current number was not compatible with the iPhone technology. I'm no rocket surgeon, but that sounded like a giant load of cr**. I turned to my friend google and a writer on apple insider had discovered this fix. It explained that if you lived somewhere that the zip code did not match the area code you lived in it would not work (like having a 303 area code but a San Fran address). The fix is to put in a zip code local to your phones area code when you begin the porting process. It did not work for me!! Ahhh!! After trying several things, I put in 00000 as my zip and it worked. Success! I was able to activate my phone and sign up for service. Woo Hoo. The porting process was expected to take about 6 hours.

The iPhone voice/data plan with ATT was pretty attractive. 900 minutes, unlimited data, and 1500 text messages for $89.99. That is about what I was paying for 600 minutes, unlimited data, and unlimited text messaging through tmobile. Score!

The next step was to sync my contacts and calendar with my iphone. It took all of 5 clicks to make this happen. In Entourage I enabled the preferences to sync my calendar with iCal and my contacts with Address Book. Then in iTunes (again, this is used to do all iphone syncing) I told it to sync the iPhone with iCal and Address Book. I then clicked sync and after a few minutes my calendar, contacts, music, and videos were all on my iPhone. Done and Done. I went to bed late thinking that my phone number would be ported and ready to go in the morning.

Well I have come to find out the number won't be released by tmobile until 11pm tonight (jealous bastards!). But for now I can send text messages, make phone calls, and browse the web from my iPhone. Incoming calls and text messages still come in on my old phone.

The last phase in this migration will be to get the Exchange server at work to push out my email via IMAP4. This will take a little configuring, a little finagling, and few swear words here and there. I will be sure to post the progress on the SRG Infotech Blog.

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