Two weeks into the campaign, David Pogue has an update about
Take Back the Beep. So far we'd say the
winner by far is Sprint, who lets you remove the pre-voicemail instructions with a relatively small amount of hassle (we're upgrading to green because Pogue has taken the carrier off his hit list). The other carriers have yet to get on board, however. T-Mobile says that "these comments are being taken into consideration in our planning," but hasn't promised any specific action -- sort of promising, but hardly a win. Meanwhile, Verizon was quoted by ABC News as saying that you could already turn off the message, but apparently what the rep meant to say is that if you don't like the message you can turn off voicemail altogether. Great. So far no hints of real action have come from big red, but the company is responding to complaints with a canned, "The voice mail instructions are there to assist the many callers who may be unfamiliar with the correct prompts." so at least we know they're getting the emails. AT&T is perhaps the most promising of the remaining carriers, saying that while
Visual Voicemail (which doesn't suffer in this way) is the true hotness, and it hopes to get that to other devices soon, "In the meantime, we are actively exploring how to shorten the voicemail message on our other handsets." That sounds promising. In the mean time, we literally have
no idea why these carriers haven't gotten together over coffee and at least figured out a unified button for skipping over the messages. It's true madness.
posted August 14th 2009 9:24AM
T-Mobile has visual voicemail for the Android-based HTC MyTouch so they are making progress.
I won't buy anything with mail in rebate, no exceptions.
LOL sorry, Roboform saved and reposted my comment from several weeks ago.
I meant to comment that YouMail and PhoneTag are much better than regular voice mail anyway. YouMail is free. I promise every one of you would love it.
US Cellular FTW!!!!! C'mon, Engadget, even though it's more of a regional cellular company at the moment, US Cellular outperforms all of the other carriers in the US.
i just press 1 and i dont hear any prompt. just the beep. why is that so hard....
Unfortunately, the "press 1' trick requires you to know in advance which carrier the person you’re calling uses, which is unrealistic!... see my post on the subject here: http://bit.ly/18VWO1
It's 1 for Sprint. But it's * for Verizon, # for AT&T, etc.
Making the instructions optional would be a MUCH superior idea.
dp
uh, duh. The instructions add minutes to the caller's bill. Why would any carrier want to remove them?
I don't care about the how to's, just give me my money back for the last 7 friggen years on 4 phones...