Sprint’s Instinct will feature Visual Voicemail
One of the neatest features introduced by the iPhone was visual voicemail — tap your way through your voicemails onscreen, rather than having to press 2, then press 7, then press 4, etc. Certainly a useful way to manage them.
Klausner Technologies owns a few patents on visual voicemail, and has previously filed a lawsuit against Apple. Sprint decided to simply pay Klausner the necessary licensing fee for the technology, and will introduce it when the Samsung Instinct comes out.
It can be assumed that the visual voicemail system on the Instinct will be similar to the system on the iPhone, but no one can say for sure. The instinct is expected to ship in June for around $200-$275.
The next step will be to add something like Spinvox to this, which converts voicemails into text. It’d be nice to see a list of voicemails in your phone (visual voicemail), be able to read each of them (Spinvox), and then choose to listen to them if the text translation wasn’t clear. I keep hoping Jott might get into the voicemail-to-text game as well, because their speech-to-text recognition is pretty solid.