I like how my iPhone’s Visual Voicemail lets me listen to messages out of order. But I also use my iPhone for note-taking, and I can’t listen to my Visual Voicemail while using another app. Or can I?
That’s one our biggest frustrations with the iPhone. But if someone leaves you a voicemail with lots of important information, and you don’t have a pen and paper handy to jot down notes, you can still call your voicemail the old-fashioned way. Go into your phone’s keypad and hold down the 1 key for two seconds to access your voicemail. Then, put your call on speakerphone, press the Home key to bring up your apps, and switch to whatever note-taking app you’d like.
Calling our voicemail the old-school way, then putting the call on speakerphone, lets us take notes at the same time.
If you’re lucky enough to have Google Voice (invite-only at press time), the service transcribes any voicemails you receive and can send you a copy as an SMS text message or email it to your Gmail account. Apple has declined to allow a native Google Voice app on the iPhone (and pulled all third-party Google Voice apps from the App Store), but you can still access the service by surfing to www.google.com/voice/m in Safari on your iPhone.
