The other day someone sent in a question and asked why they should pay for a service like PhoneTag when Verizon’s Visual Voicemail is free?  This is a fair question and deserves an honest answer.

Visual Voicemail

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that Verizon’s Visual Voicemail and PhoneTag, although related, are very different types of services.  Visual Voicemail is basically a GUI interface that allows you to see a visual reprsentation of your voicemail messages that you have in your voicemail cue.  Think of how email comes into your inbox.  Email meessages are displayed in the order that you received them, however, you can read them in whatever order you like.

Visual Voicemail, like with your email inbox, gives you the ability to listen to your messages in whatever order you desire as compared to sequentially like with standard voice mail systems. Visual Voicemail is visual in the sense that you are able to see whom a voicemail is from before you actually listen to it.

PhoneTag

To make a long post a little shorter, PhoneTag can do all that stuff up above, however, that is where the similarity ends.

What makes PhoneTag special is that that not only does it allow you see who voicemail messages are from before you listen to them, it truly makes your voicemail visual by transcribing the voicemail message and presenting you with a text representation of the voicemail itself.

When someone sends you a voicemail, you don’t have to see who it from and then listen to it…  Going back to the email inbox analogy, you can simply read the voicemail like you would the email.  What is even cooler is that you can respond back to the voicemail via an email or text message.

PhoneTag is one sweet application for your BlackBerry but you don’t have to take my word for it.  They offer and 7-day free trial, however, that isn’t really long enough for you to test it out so we’ve set up a 30-day free trial of PhoneTag just for RIMarkable readers.