Having been an iPhone fan (user) since 2008 with O2 I’ve been used to the great technology that is visual voicemail.  It makes far more sense than the 15+ year old normal voicemail technology.  It’s visual and you can easily see who’s called, when and then listen to which message you want to, when you want to.  Nice.

I moved to Vodafone through work on another iPhone and they didn’t have it but I was happy with my own set up on O2.  When I then moved from O2 to Vodafone on my personal one, I’d assumed I’d get the same great voicemail service from Vodafone – I mean they provide the best network coverage in the UK, surely they must have the same basic technology services as their competitors – but no, it was back to old fashioned e-mail.  But I put up with it for a few months before moving mobile networks again.

This time to Three – they’re offering an amazingly priced deal for iPhones (me providing the phone and them the service) and these guys invented 3G didn’t they?  Well sort of, I mean it’s in their name and they were the original 3G network providers in UK.

Signal strength from Three not great – particularly when indoors but their service around data must be the best, surely?  And that must include visual voicemail – or so I naively thought.  Their voicemail service isn’t even close to Vodafone’s non-visual one.  You either have a text message from Three telling you you’ve received a voicemail or no notifications.  The text messages I find annoying so don’t want to use them.  But the alternative is nothing.  Rubbish.  And by nothing I mean nothing.  The phone might register a missed call but there’s not even a counter on the voicemail icon to say there’s a message.  Something’s not right there.

I know, I’ll speak to Three and see what they say.  A message to their support team and a phone call back from their very outsourced support team, who try to point me in some direction but end up saying I need to speak to their iPhone experts who then ask me to explain everything from the start again – that sort of service really gets me.  They’ve not listened or they have and chosen to ignore me and their processes – yes that word again – mean they can’t link things up properly.  Rubbish again.  The guy tries to help but eventually just says they don’t support visual voicemail as their customers don’t want it.  Really?  Aren’t I a customer?  I want it and others do as well.  How many have you asked?

A quick Tweet to the Three Twitter account and pretty much the same response – but delayed (which is also a little surprising)…

If the new benchmark has been set by Apple and O2 5 years ago when the iPhone was released why on earth aren’t all the mobile networks keeping up with the technology that consumers (yes that’s us) want?  It’s all down to money and the commercials – which I guess isn’t surprising.  Why aren’t these guys trying to be more innovative and give people useful services that they want?

See a post on Mobile Industry Review by Ewan MacLeod, that very nicely says it like it is…

If you’re interested here’s a very nice how-to guide for how to use visual voicemail on your iPhone – obviously if (and it’s a big if) you’re network supports it…

If not try one of the 3rd party services like HulloMail – that I’ve just downloaded and will be testing – or wait (for how long though we have no idea).

What do you think?  Am I expecting too much?