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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.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

Source:
YouMail visual voice mail iPhone app gets pushy

Google will now allow Google Voice users to invite friends to the service, the company wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

Google Voice invites in action.

(Credit:
Google

According to Google, Voice users have been requesting to “share Google Voice with friends and family.” To satisfy that desire, Google will now allow users to invite up to three friends to the service. The invite-a-friend feature is being added to accounts over the next few weeks, so not all users will have the option of inviting others immediately. According to the company, the “Invite a friend” link will appear on the left side of the user’s in-box.

When users want to invite a friend, they need only to input the recipient’s e-mail address, add a brief message, and send it off. The recipient will receive the message and a link allowing them to sign up for Google Voice.

Google Voice, which has been in the news quite a bit lately over its inability to gain access to Apple’s App Store, requires those who want to sign up for the service to submit their e-mail addresses to Google and wait to be notified that they can sign up. The invite-a-friend feature, Google reasons, gives them another opportunity to gain access to the service.

Although Google Voice users will only be able to invite three people at first, Google did say in its blog post that it will be providing more invites in the future.

Continued here:
Google adds ‘invite a friend’ feature to Google Voice

(Credit: gDial Pro)

Not long ago, my colleague Rafe Needleman ranked a handful of native Google Voice applications for mobile phones, declaring Google’s own Google Voice app for Android phones the winner. No big surprise there, as Google owns both the voice service and the mobile operating system, and can snugly fit the Google Voice dialing option into the native dialer. Let’s throw another app into the mix, this time it’s a Palm WebOS app called gDial Pro.

The free gDial Pro Google Voice client has been around in a homebrew version for a while (a version you can install outside of the App Catalog environment,) and recently became available in Palm’s App Catalog. It is a glossy, dark-themed app that, rather than replicate the in-box design of Google’s Android app, concentrates on outgoing calls and texts, in addition to a communication history.

gDial Pro opens to a dialpad view where you can start dialing a number, select a contact from the phone’s address book, or begin typing a name on the keypad to pull up Google Voice contacts. The contacts’ names and numbers won’t automatically transfer into the Palm’s native address book (for that you’re better off syncing the Palm with your Google account), but the app integrates them into WebOS’s universal search.

Back in gDial Pro, a navigation ribbon on the bottom jumps you to the SMS view; the in-box where you can sort by SMS, voice mail, and missed communications; and to your favorites. We especially like the Web view, which opens the mobile online version of Google Voice so you can refer back to it from time to time.

It’s true that gDial Pro doesn’t have the tight integration that Google’s Android app has. Like most alternatives, it requires using its own dialpad to engage the Google Voice service; otherwise, you’ll be going through the carrier. However, It does, make things simpler by offering a smoother connection via the optional Web dial feature. The Web dialing feature operates over Wi-Fi or the carrier’s data connection. Like dialing over a voice connection, the Web dial method also prompts Google Voice to call your phone to connect to the service, but it’s less clunky. Voice dialing uses Google Voice’s automated-attendant voice mail system to place calls. Unfortunately, Web dialing won’t work if you’re in an area with weak data signal or if you’re roaming without a data agreement–in these cases, you’ll have to use the alternative method to place calls with Google Voice.

While the dialer isn’t as seamless as Google’s Android app, gDial Pro’s Google Voice client is the best choice for Palm WebOS device owners. Another free Google Voice app, p2GoogleVoice, challenges gDial Pro from both the homebrew side and from the App Catalog, but without Web dial or an in-box, it only originates calls and texts. Until Google releases an official Google Voice application for Palm WebOS, gDial Pro is your best choice.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

See original here:
gDial Pro brings Google Voice to Palm WebOS

Two new little Google Voice features just made their way into Gmail. A new option lets text messages sent to Google Voice show up as e-mail messages in Gmail. You can reply to messages from Gmail, too, which makes it a nice platform for carrying on a text message conversation.

Google Voice text messages can now be read and replied to from within Gmail.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Also, there’s a new Labs feature in Gmail that lets you play your Google Voice voicemail messages from inside the Gmail viewer. Previously, Gmail would send you the text transcript of your message, but if you wanted to play the audio file, it would open a new browser window to do so.

Small snags: Although the features are thematically linked, they’re enabled differently. The SMS feature is turned on within the Settings tab of Google Voice; the Gmail voicemail player needs to be enabled from withing the Labs tab of Gmail. Also, while receiving and replying to Google Voice SMS messages in Gmail is now easy, I didn’t see how one could initiate a Google Voice SMS conversation from within Gmail even with the SMS feature turned on.

I like where this is going. I’m still not a been a huge fan of the Gmail user interface, but it’s great to be able to see and manage e-mails, voicemails, and SMS messages all in one place. It will be interesting to see if Google Wave gets similar Universal Inbox features.

Google announced these enhancements on the Google Voice Blog (the SMS feature) and the Gmail Blog (voicemail player).

Originally posted at Rafe’s Radar

Here is the original:
Google Voice and Gmail are sort of merging

Pidgin has introduced a major update with version 2.6.0, and the current bug-fixing 2.6.1, and along with more than 100 fixes between the two comes support for Google Voice and Google Talk. If you’re on Windows, though, this won’t mean much–the protocol currently only works with XMPP at the moment, not the derivative protocol that Google uses. Pidgin Portable 2.6.1 is also available for USB keys.

Other changes include splitting the Yahoo protocols into two, one for Yahoo Japan, and one for the rest of the world. Both protocols in Pidgin now support SMS numbers. MSN account users now can receive voice clips and handwritten notes, and there was a major security fix for MSN pushed in version 2.5.9.

The full list of changes can be read here.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

The rest is here:
Pidgin gets Google Voice–sort of