YouView – Take Back Your Voicemail

When I got my first “superphone” (the Samsung Instinct), the first thing that blew me away was a little thing called “visual voicemail.” It really is a game changing tech. If you don’t know what visual voicemail means…it is simply a way of seeing who called and left a voicemail without actually listenting to the whole list of calls. You can see who called, and how long the message is without listening to a thing. Beautiful!

Problem is…the Palm Pre doesn’t have it.

But that is what apps are for right? If you feel, as I do, that your Palm Pre is incomplete without visual voicemail, then you may want to give YouView a try. YouView (powered by YouMail) is an all purpose visual voicemail app that completely takes the place of the standard voicemail system in your phone.

When you download the app, you have to create a free account and give them your phone number and a pin. At this point they will make a 2 second call to their systems to set you all up. It really is dead simple. Once setup, you will no longer use your carrier’s voicemail system at all. You can even set it up so that if you push 1 on your phone you will go to YouView’s servers…not your carrier.

After the basics are setup you can choose some more advanced options, like “Smart Greetings”. A Smart Greeting is a nice voice that uses caller id to recognize the person calling. True story…after I had it all setup my best friend called me and left a message. He was so taken aback by the “beautiful lady inside my phone that knew his name” that he completely forgot why he called in the first place. A few years ago it was easy to freak someone out by knowing who was calling before answering…now your voicemail can do it. Awesome.

Now if you don’t like the beautiful lady, you can, of course, customize your greeting. You can even set things up so that if someone calls you with a blocked or private number that you can give them a different greeting or hang up on them altogether. If you are really hardcore with your greetings, YouMail has a ton of premium greetings (most of which are completely free). My personal favorites are GLaDOS, and “I’m about to” (seriously…hilarious for a voicemail).

So you, being the casanova (casanovette?) that you are…you start getting some calls. When you miss a call, of course your phone tells you, but when a message is left you not only are notified by the YouView app itself, but you get a text message as well (if you want). You can even configure it to email you if you wish. Once you have your message you can launch YouView and see everything about the call. Who, when, and how long are displayed for each call. Tapping on it will play the message right away. You can flag it as important, share it with others, or just save it for later all with a few taps. Very handy stuff. Right now the app does not recognize people (except through caller ID), but Syntactix is working on a contact list sync so that your friends pictures will show up with each message.

If you are into messing around with preferences, YouView has got a ton of them:

• Email/Text/App alerts
• Contact sorting
• Automatic downloads
• Greetings
  • Smart greetings
  • Blocked/Private greetings

What is really interesting about YouView is that it hooks you into a larger network. Through their YouMail website, you can setup multiple phone numbers that are all fowarded to the same location so that you can check everything from a single place. There is even DropBox support so you can essentially keep your voicemails forever.

Now with all of these features, I expected a monthly cost. The app is $3.99 itself and with that you get a free account on YouMail which includes all of the features that I have described in this walkthrough. They have a premium service ($1.99/month) that allows you to do several more things such as:

• Remove all the ads on their site
• Increase your storage (up to 5,000 voicemails)
• Longer message times (up to 5 minutes)
• Live support

For you businessy types, they also offer a transcription service to transform your voicemails to text with plans ranging from $3.99 – $39.99 per month.

Now all of this can get a little complicated, so if the app sounds like something you want to use but think it might be a bit much, have no fear. YouView has a lot of help options in the app itself and on top of that they have an entire help site that has the answer to just about any question you may have. If that doesn’t help, they have support forums as well.

To see YouView in action, be sure to check out the video up top. Wanna get it right now? Head on over to appRoundup and download it straight to your phone.