Don't wait for iPhone

I wouldn't normally just endorse a product anywhere, but twice in my life now I've come across the "killer app" that made my life better or easier.

Voice mail, for me, has always been a pain in the ASS.  I'm not a big cell phone fan, so I leave it at home when I go to work, most of the time, and hardly do I ever call anyone that I can email.  I've been conditioned, from a job in high school, to hate the phone too.  But people have my number, and they call without fail, almost every day, and leave a voice mail.  I check my phone when I get home, and I'll have 5 messages.  I never listen to them.  I eventually have to listen to them, or at least go through and erase them, when I get a call from someone who I would like to talk to (re: job or friend or family), or when my inbox fills up.

No longer!  I came across this service called GotVoice.com.  It's free, with an option to upgrade the service for $10 a month.  The iPhone's one killer feature that I would possibly consider getting it for, the random voice mail retrieval bit, is covered by this.  The iPhone's will be better, judging from what Steve Jobs showed us on his keynote introducing it back in January.  GotVoice has bits of your service's computer voice with the instructions recorded into it, but I'm sure it's a timing thing that can easily be worked out.  Nevertheless, it's not a big deal, and this thing retrieves your voice messages and allows you to play which ever one you want.

The free version offers scheduled message retrievals 3 times a day.  The paid version retrieves once an hour.  The paid version also offers mp3s of your messages forwarded to your email account, and an rss feed.  I get email saying I've got a new message, but no mp3s.  Yet.  And the paid version will log in to keep your voice mail up to date with what messages you deleted nightly, as opposed to weekly on the free version.  In free mode, you can send an mp3 attachment of any message to any email address.

This is absolutely something I would pay for, if / when I find out that the free version just isn't cutting it.

The other killer app for me was coffeeam.com, which will deliver two random pounds of freshly roasted whole bean coffee, from all over the world (like Galapagos Islands) to your doorstep for $25 a month including shipping :)