"YouMail (www.youmail.com), the only generally available, free, customizable cell phone voicemail service, today announced the public beta of visual voicemail for smartphone users. The new mobile platform allows users to access YouMail from their smartphone home screen, enabling them to listen to voicemail messages, or forward messages on to other people, or reply via SMS without ever having to dial into their voicemail service. "

Our tireless news editor, Darius, assigned this to me over a week ago, and I held off posting on it until I had a chance to look at the service myself. After a week or so, I'm happy with YouMail's visual voicemail offering (it's certainly priced better than competitor Callwave), but have yet to find exactly how to get it on my smartphone's home screen. I believe their beta was a bit overwhelming to them, so they may be holding off on posting the client or instructions until things have settled down. Still, the service they have now is acceptable - voicemails sent to my email as text, quite nice.

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