iPhone Tethering and Visual Voicemail
The life of a writer can be rather tedious at times, not only do we often have to get up early in the morning to meet the arbitrary deadlines set by our editors but sometimes reality has an annoying way of getting in the way of a good story.
This week is a perfect example.
What I wanted to write was a column asking when Vodacom was going to finally deliver two key iPhone services, both of which I could really use.
These are Visual Voicemail and iPhone tethering. It’s been 18 months since Vodacom released the iPhone in SA and at that time the assembled press were told that Visual Voicemail would be ready in 6 months or so. Well it turns out that it was less of the 6 months and more of the ‘or so’.
So there I was warming up for a rant on Vodacom’s inability to deliver the services they promise and how can they call themselves a telecoms company when they can’t even get these simple things right. Just like DStv and series recording. At this point I came across a post on Twitter asking how Vodacom could justify charging R10 per month for Visual Voicemail.
Now I know that I have been off sick for a couple of days but could I have missed an announcement like that? Was I so far from the centre of the technology news that I could have missed this? And more importantly, what was I supposed to write about if Vodacom had stolen my thunder.
Well it turns out that Visual Voicemail has not been launched yet.
The little birdies at Vodacom tell me that it is still in testing and not yet ready for public consumption.
However, if you send an SMS from your iPhone to 123 with VVM ON in the body, you may or may not get the service activated. For me it worked but from what I understand Vodacom are making no guarantees that the service will deliver any more reliability than one would expect from a service in a test phase.
And for those people that are getting all heated up about the R10 charge it’s time for a reality check. First Visual Voicemail works by sending your voicemails via the data network to your handset. The R10 ensures that you do not run down your data allocation listening to your voicemails. Secondly, the utility of being able to listen to voicemails in any order you want is well worth R10/month in my book and lastly, its R10 for goodness sake. You can’t even buy a decent coffee for R10 nowadays, I somehow doubt that it is going to break the bank. If you can afford an iPhone, you can afford R10 for a really useful service.
On the tethering side of things, I understand that there are issues bigger than those that affect us down here in little SA holding this back. Primarily because those countries that offer unlimited data plans don’t really want their iPhone users hogging all the bandwidth.
I am sure there are ways that you can hack the iPhone to get it to do tethering, but I am really only interested in an official app that allows me to link my notebook and my iPhone with as little difficulty as possible.
But for now I am just hoping that Vodacom doesn’t disable my Visual Voicemail.
Vodacom iPhone visual voicemail << discussion
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