The first reviews of iPhone are starting to come out. Saw this on the NY Times:
On the iPhone, you don’t check your voice mail; it checks you. One button press reveals your waiting messages, listed like e-mail. There’s no dialing in, no password — and no sleepy robot intoning, “You…have…twenty…one…messages.”
I so so so so so hate voicemail. But this makes it much more email-like … which is a quantum leap.
[tags] iphone, voice mail, email, john koetsier [/tags]
You know a form of communications media is bad when making it “much more email-like” is an IMPROVEMENT.
Here’s a really thoughtful analysis by Sramana Mitra on why the iPhone is significant.
Interesting, Bob – different perspective than mine.
I hate voicemail:
– it’s a pain to access
– it’s slow to sort through
– I can’t just hit the “reply” button
– saved messages on my carrier get automatically deleted after 14 days
– can’t file them, can’t archive one permanently, can’t tag them
– can’t search them
Need I go on?
Email, for all it’s faults, is a quick, asynchronous method of communication that I can do precisely what I want with.
Hi John:
I probably was a bit flip in my original comment. But I am not a fan of e-mail, for a couple of reasons:
1. Many people lack the writing ability to express themselves clearly and precisely via e-mail. (the same might be said of me writing blog comments).
2. More importantly, e-mail has the impact of more traditional correspondence, but its ‘immediacy’ (yeah, I know you don’t HAVE to respond to e-mail instantly) takes the element of thoughtful consideration out of the mix. It’s the immediacy of face-to-face chat without the non-verbal cues or the richness of f2f communication.
I totally agree with you about voice mail. It does suck. And making it more e-mail like would be an improvement (Of course, we Canadians won’t be able to know for sure for several months yet, since we don’t get iPhones until the winter). But I think that e-mail itself is far from a flawless means of communicating. Like democracy, I suppose it’s the worst system, save for all the others.