Last week I blogged about CallWave’s new Visual Voicemail service for use with mobile phones. I wrote that I really liked the service, but had two gripes:

 

1. Callers didn’t get my personal greeting, instead reached a generic CallWave message.

 

2. I couldn’t access my voicemail from my phone any longer—only using the online, visual mailbox.

 

I heard back from two reps at CallWave (you can read their notes in the comments section of this blog) who pointed out that, actually, the Visual Voicemail service has functionality built in that overcome both the problems I was encountering.

 

First, you can record a personal greeting by dialing your own number from your phone, or by calling a special number provided by CallWave. This takes you into voicemail setup. I was able to record a greeting in a snap.

 

Second, the reason I couldn’t access my voicemail by phone was that I was using a special shortcut on my keypad to dial into the Cingular voicemail system. This was a different route to access messages than dialing my own number; once I did that, I was able to listen to my messages as usual.

 

I did suggest to the CallWave reps that they modify the initial instructions users get to include the details they sent me, and I’m assured this will be done. So, I’m happy to report that CallWave Visual Voicemail does, indeed, do everything I hoped. Try it out yourself and let me know what you think. If you have a smartphone, while you're at it you might want to check out another new CallWave service called Vtxt that sends a text message with the 'gist' of your voicemails in it to your mobile phone.