One of the first phones to introduce visual voice mail is the Samsung Instinct. Not really categorized as a smart phone, but it did a fine job at mimicking one and toting fun against the iPhone. This left a lot of high profile smart phones out of the loop with only the default voice mail system; this required the customer to search and install their own voice mail system. Another hurdle that had to be overcame were the call forwarding charges, which required you to activate the conditional call forward feature and direct the caller to an alternate phone number. Even with the new Palm Pre, as Sprint’s flagship smartphone, offered only the default voice mail system that really plagued a lot of minds; “Why did a THAT phone get Visual Voicemail, and the Pre didn’t?”

Voice mail services started rocking into people’s hearts and sprint heard their customer’s cries for a visual voice mail and dropped the call forwarding fee. YouMail has been in the game for a while, before Google started opening their Google Voice beta program. You Mail offer’s some strong features, with awesome text-to-speech transcriptions (with service fee), custom voicemail greetings and handling – for free.

The developer(s) over at Syntactix LLC have been working with a visual voice mail client that will assist the webOS users with easier access to their YouMail account. The application is available in Palm’s App Catalog for 3.99 and offer’s a solid user experience to handle your voice mails. Their website is funcitonal, but doesn’t really point out that they’ve developed an application for the webOS devices. You can however find their direct support page at http://gosyntactix.com/webos/youview/ which has some basic links to direct them around their default tool set and link to precentral.net forum for Syntactix LLC.

During the installation, you will be assisted with setting up your sprint number and YouMail service. Once you’ve provided your phone number and pin, YouMail will automatically dial out to activate and forward the unanswered calls to YouMail’s call center. Typically, you will only hear a short ‘beep’ and phone will immediately end – not bad & simple.

The application works in the back ground and with YMA notifications appearing in the bottom that you have ‘x’ amount of voice mails. The application has a verysimply layout that is similar to an email application. Immediately there are some drop down tools to organize your vm’s and easy access to play back the messages, flag for importance, move into a folder, call the person back, transcription notice, share the message and other features to mark as read and download to the phone. The preferences section will allow for custom behaviors and application management, such as; notification handling, automatic voice mail downloads and greeting arrangements. Hopefully with future updates, the application could assist us with creating additional greetings and pin them to contacts.

Once the voice mail has been received, the application will play the audio back through the loud speaker only, due to the SDK limitations. The developer has noted that the volume was set at a low level for privacy, or you can simply just hook up a pair of headphones and listen away. Each voice mail will have important caller data, phone number, locations, date received and vm durations. When tapping the vm, a temporary player with a scrub bar will appear at the top of the screen, allowing you to replay a certain time index if the message wasn’t clear.

YouView also tries to extend its capabilities by updating your Palm’s contacts with You Mail’s contact information. According to the developers app notations, this feature is in beta, and the user assumes responsibilities for backing up their own contact information before proceeding. Adding the contact information to YouMail’s servers will allow the app to ID the voice mail and properly provide who its from.

The application deserves a solid 9 out of 10, it offer’s easy management of your voice mails & enough options to back-up, save & share them with other people (if necessary). The app integrates well with YouMail’s services, and YouMail itself is a solid service that is offered free to consumers. The text transcriptions does require a premium fee, but my experience says it’s one of the best voice recognition services. Even with the YouView’s contacts feature in beta state, it works well enough that I believe I have THE answer for a stable Visual Voice Mail system.