Pogue: Visual Voicemail 'feature of the year'

Telstra over here in Australia have has Video MessageBank on their 3G/Next G phones for a while now.

No way... Simulscribe and Spinvox beat this hands down (plus Visual Voicemail is nothing new anyway, they have had it in Japan for a long time)...

Visual voicemail is definitely a plus I've taken it for granted already I forgot what the big deal about it was. SimulScribe is interesting if you want to read your messages. However, I like to listen to my messages not read them esp. since I'm reading emails and other things all day long. Its nice just to listen to someone's voice once in a while. In Leopard I'm thankful for Quick Look, TM and Spaces. I use those features all the time. I also like what they have done with Spotlight.

No matter who I show it to or how much they know/care about the iPhone this simple feature ALWAYS wows people.
It should have been on phones 5 years ago and people know it.

Quick Look is awesome. It really helps me out to find stuffs. It`s the most useful feature of Leopard.

About Visual Voicemail ... I can`t really say anything. I`m using an unlocked iphone. sad sad sad .......

The idea behind Quick Look is hardly new - something similar called QuickView was introduced in Windows 95, and I believe there was something in OS/2 that was broadly comparable. At the time, I thought QuickView was wonderful, even though I didn't use it much - and it seems that not many people *did* use it, as it was killed off by the time Windows 2000 came out.

No, it is of course, as with many of the things that make Macs (and Apple products in general) a pleasure to use, the implementation of an idea, more than whether the idea is brand new or not that really proves Apple's innovation.

QuickView was flawed in a number of ways, from (probably) not having a plug-in architecture (that anyone ever made use of), to being a separate program. Sure, you could right-click and select it from the menu but it never felt integrated.

As for Visual Voicemail, I think that it might have been done before, but in this case the success has boiled down to Apple's deals with the networks and also marketing. If Visual Voicemail did exist before the iPhone then no-one knew about it!

Sam

Visual voicemail is stupid. In fact, I don't even use conventional voicemail because voicemail is so... 2006.

I haven't checked my voicemail in almost a year, because it's a real waste of time. Ya know why? It's cuz I have SIMULSCRIBE. Look it up. You'll be like, "WTF is the big deal with visual voicemail?"

Quick Look and Time Machine both rock, but Screen Sharing is like buttah. 90% of the vital features of ARA, built into the OS for free? Compare this to Vista; only the Ultimate version features VNC capabilities in the box. The controlled computers don't have to be running Leopard or even Mac OS, it handles general VNC as well. Its not really a "new" or innovative feature, but it typifies Apple at their best, taking something relatively complicated and annoying/expensive to set up previously and making it accessible/cheap/easy.

Visual Voicemail is nothing new (outside of U.S. market).

The European LG Chocolate has had it for a couple years now.

I'm not sure if something so obvious (this is the way voicemail should have worked from day 1) should be on the "best" list or if all other voicemail implementations should perpetually be on the "worst" list.