User Centered

We've talked about this many times in the past: "A new spin on voicemail" "Simple Cell Phones" (second half), and here and here as well.

...well, I may have finally found an implementation that gets me about 95% of the way to having "near real time voice mail" (a concept Don Norman wrote about). It comes in the form of pinger.com and it's a "voice" version of a text message. How is that not a good 'ol fashion voice mail you ask? Well, it's not preceded by a phone call for one. There are times when I want to send a message to someone but don't want to bother them. From the site:

We've all been there-you make a call and think to yourself, "please don't pick up", or you call and think "I hope I'm not interrupting..." With Pinger you leave the message at your convenience, and they get it at their convenience. Unlike voicemail, there is no ringing, no annoying prompts, no lengthy greetings-just your message. Try sending a group message out to a bunch of people on different mobile phones. It's impossible without Pinger.

I've tried this out a bit and I really like it.

Pros-
1) When the caller gets a notification, it comes as a text message with a phone number embedded in it. Most phones (?) will let you select and dial the number from the inbox- and then you immediately hear the message. No prompts or button presses or anything. Perfect!

2) Free of charge

3) Easily grabbed my address book from my Mac and imported it. This allows voice dialing that was accurate on every entry I've tried so far... YMMV. Although- the import didn't work in Opera.

4) Great for leaving a note for yourself

5) Recipient can reply to a voice message with a voice message in turn, and I (the original sender) get pinged back.

Cons-
1) You haven't heard of this. Or... the phone companies haven't heard of it. It's a third party app, and it's GREAT for being a third party app. It would be nice if a company would buy out pinger and find a way to get the SMS message it sends to show it's from my contact instead of from pinger.com. But that's a VERY small gripe.

I recommend this! As much as I've grown reliant on text messaging, I'm sure this tool will come in handy when I'm not able/wanting to type.


PS- They have a BlackBerry app that acts as an inbox for your pinger messages. I'm not sure what value this adds over the inbox though.