by Jeremy Kessel

Earlier last month, we caught wind of a possible visual voicemail service for AT&T BlackBerry users. Now, on the eve of CTIA Wireless 2009, Comverse has announced its own BlackBerry visual voicemail solution for carriers.

The Comverse Visual Voicemail solution delivers all messages to a BlackBerry’s inbox, complete with each voicemail’s date, time and length, as well as each caller’s phone number and identity if available. Listening to messages and returning phone calls are as simple as clicking on the message.

Visual voicemail is actually just one component of the company’s Comverse Voice HUB solution:

The Voice HUB, Comverse’s advanced single platform for all voice services, provides a “Whole Voice” experience — a spectrum of revenue opportunities for every call. It enables quick and cost-effective launch of innovative mass-market voice-related services.

Comverse will demo its visual voicemail service at CTIA in Vegas starting tomorrow. Now all we need is a major carrier (or three) to jump on the bandwagon.

In the meantime, you can keep using YouMail’s free vv service. See ya on voicemail…

by Devin Coldewey

We’ve just finished liveblogging the event, and the iPhone 3.0 press conference has definitely yielded some delicious morsels of functionality. Here is pretty much everything you need to know, though as things get more clear throughout the day, we’ll update this post. You guys will probably be seeing these features sometime this summer.

We’ll have pictures and a hands-on in just a few minutes so keep your eyes open.

iPhone 3.0 Features for you:
• Push
• PUSH!
• Bluetooth will be used to auto-discover nearby people for games without any pairing. They then can communicate via Wi-Fi. Hopefully it’s secure, it could be nice.
• There will NOT be background processing, no matter how much you want it. Reduces battery life. As if battery life could get much worse, noted a commenter.
• Cut, Copy and Paste: This feature was seen riding a dinosaur into the auditorium. Anyway, it’s finally here and it even applies to image(s). Simply double tap a word and it gets highlighted with “cut, copy or paste” above. For a block of text you just tap a word and drag the edges. It works across all applications. It seems like anywhere the magnifier works, copy and paste will work. If you accidentally paste the wrong word or phrase then just shake the iPhone for an “Undo” prompt. To redo just shake again.
• Meebo coming as a native app for iPhone. That sounds nice.
• New “home” screen to the left of your current far-left one. It has a Spotlight search, looks for stuff all over your phone.
• Calendar supports CalDAV now, you can subscribe to other calendars online. Useful for syncing with your spouse or whatnot, even if they’re on Google or Yahoo.
• Many apps will now support internal search, including Mail. It’s incomplete (doesn’t search message contents) but it’ll search IMAP servers, so if you’ve got GMail for instance you’ll be good. A collective sigh of relief emanates from iPhone owners.
• Landscape keyboard all up in every app you can think of.
• Multimedia Messages! This feature flew in on a Pterodactyl.
• Stereo Bluetooth. I know how much you love that, honey, so I just went and got it for you.
• Hotspot auto-login. Because you love Starbucks but don’t want to waste time inputting passwords.
• Send and receive files between your iPhone and iPod Touch. That’s awesome.

3.0 features for App store and Developers:

• Apps can talk directly to accessories — FM transmitters, stereos, anything you like. Expect a lot of bundled apps with your iPhone bundled apps. How about an NES-like iPhone controller for those emulators?
• You can get subscription apps now, in case you weren’t paying enough already.
• Apps can now use voice communication. I foresee controversy.
• Embeddable maps for developers. Now they won’t have to launch Maps outside their application. Handy for shopping apps.
• Buy stuff in-app: I’m calling this the “Sims” feature. You could also use it to buy books for a reader, or new maps for a game, that sort of thing.
• Turn by turn directions in navigation apps now. First one probably from Telenav.
• Apps can access the user’s library of music and videos, so you could have the background music in a game be the user’s.
• Lots of new APIs, too many to list here but if you’re a dev you’re gonna check it out.
• Tethering support is in there, but “will depend on each carrier on supporting it.”

The upgrade will be free for iPhone users, but iPod Touch folks will have to shell out $10, like last time.

Well, we didn’t get fixes for a lot of our issues with the iPhone, but a lot of this stuff will be really handy. Search and push in particular will make this a lot more useful for business types. We’ll let you all know as soon as we know anything more, say about the release date for this big mother of an update.

Unannounced Podcast features in iPhone OS 3.0
by Greg Kumparak

The more our guys play with the the new iPhone OS 3.0 firmware, the more little gems they’re finding. Tucked away within the Podcast playback screen are a few subtle changes that went unmentioned during today’s announcement. Apple did say there were some 100 new features in the new OS, so it’ll probably be awhile before we see them all. Read more »

by Matt Burns
Tethering a mobile phone to a laptop was once was a laborious adventure into the depths of forums and hack sites. Eventually though, the task become a bit easier with just a few settings on both the phone and the notebook, but TetherBerry makes it even easier. Like stupid easy.

TetherBerry has been in beta for a while now and set to go retail at 1pm PT today so you may wanna jump on the beta quick to give her a test drive. You will be impressed.

The tethering task is completed with a small app being installed on both the BlackBerry and the PC. Once both of these small programs are fired up, you’re done. There isn’t any settings that needs adjusting on either the PC or mobile. It just works, and it’s not terribly slow.

I saw a speed of 1403 kb/s up and 584 KB/s down while testing the app this morning which is totally acceptable by my standards. Google Chrome loaded the pages fast and it worked great. This is seriously the easiest solution available. It’s too bad that there isn’t a OS X release or Bluetooth mode, but we have to imagine that those are coming soon. Hopefully.

There are many ways to customize your iPhone. Aside from adorning it with different stuffs, you may as well want to customize it internally by putting in your own ringtones and sounds. Of course, Apple has already pre-installed ringtones of different types in the iPhone and you can get to use them right away the moment that you bought it; however, if you want your gadget to be more personalized, you have the option to install your very own sounds into it.

iPhone ringtone downloads can be obtained from the internet. You can get them directly from Apple?s website but you will have to pay $2 for each tone that you are going to get. The half of that amount will go to the song while the other half will go to the conversion of that song into a ringtone.

Aside from Apple, there certainly are other websites out there where you can download ringtones for iPhone. One of the best sites is iTunes. You won?t have to pay for anything to get the iTunes software but wherever you download anything through it, there is a minimal fee to pay.

Some sites offer unlimited downloads of iPhone ringtones but normally, you will have to pay a one-time subscription fee. If you are a gadget aficionado, you?ll find out sooner or later that the price is worth the benefits that you will get out of the exclusive membership that you signed up for.

Choosing personalized iPhone ringtones gives a load of fun and excitement to the user. You can assign different ringtones to each of your contacts. Hence, before you can ever look at the phone, you will know who is calling you. If you have 20 close friends, you can designate a tone for each of them. You can also designate your favorite tune to the most special person of your life.

You can make the ringtones match your personality. Downloading iPhone ringtones that will blend well with your character is like sharing a piece of yourself every time one of them plays.

The craze for ringtones is everywhere. While there are still many websites that offer limitless iPhone ringtone downloads, take advantage of it. You?ll never know when good offers like this will last. It?s worth the investment after all.

Want to know more ways on how to download ringtones for your iPhone? Click this link to my website.

Source: iphone