Dear Mobile Operator

I have been using mobile phones for years, but innovation seems limited to design, convergence and being able to access the web, stream videos, download music, access Facebook, MySpace, network, etc, etc. The basic way we use phones as a voice tool hasn’t changed, and sadly hasn’t been challenged until now.

However, there are enabling technologies out there that can make the dated mobile telephone more accessible.

One is already in place – visual voicemail on the iPhone.

This is brilliant. I can see all my saved voicemails as a list and just tap the one I want to listen to again. If I have 10 voicemails, I don’t have to listen to the first 9 before I get to the one I want to listen to – number 10. I know I can “skip” voicemails on a traditional phone, but I still have to start listening to each voicemail chronologically. Painful and unnecessary.

OK, I am fortunate to own an iPhone, but other mobile owners who don’t have such a great enabling piece of technology are limited by the old school telephony methods.

So, please, please, please invest in voice-to-text technology. It’s been around for years and is very good now. In fact, there are companies that are already offering this technology. You can pay a subscription fee to divert your voicemails to an automated service that listens to your message and converts it into a text message, and then forwards this to your cell phone. You can still dial in and listen to your voicemail but you also have a text message with a transcript.

Having an SMS is a brilliant enabler – it means you don’t have to listen to the voicemails (makes you more efficient), plus it also provides a mechanism where hard of hearing people can use a mobile more effectively. It also leverages mobile phones’ ability to recognise telephone numbers in SMS messages so you can quickly dial them, instead of needing pen and paper to jot down the number that your best friend just left you when you are in the middle of the park.

It also helps busy execs access messages when they probably shouldn’t – quickly scanning an SMS while they’re in a meeting (at least they don’t have to nip out and listen to the message).

OK, OK, OK – I know you are going to tell me that companies like www.spinvox.com (from 20p per message) are already offering this in the UK, and www.hullomail.com (currently free) will be soon, but why does it take independent entrepreneurs to solve a problem that could easily be solved at source by the mobile operators? We also need sensible pricing – if I only got a few voicemails 20p per message doesn’t seem to bad, but you only need 5 a day and you’re spending a whole price plan again just to get SMS message conversions.

If you offered this service at source, as a mobile owner I could simply add your service to my existing talk plan and “job done”. I wouldn’t need to remember to dial a different message centre to receive my voicemails (if I wanted to listen to them), or have to check an email account to get at my MP3s. I could just hit the “check voicemail [1]” key and there they were. No reprogramming, no redirecting, just straight through. Plus I get the text messages.

So, dear mobile operator, why aren’t you offering this service yet?

It’s 2008 and there are so many enabling technologies, but there is such a lack of integrated enabling technologies. Please hurry up and make our lives simpler!

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