Dashwire, a small Seattle start-up eleven employees strong, continues to impress with its growing service for managing and interacting with the contents of your cell phone online. To recap an earlier review, Dashwire synchronizes your cell phone to an online account, displaying on a flexible dashboard your call history, images, profile, texting history, photos, ring tones, videos, and contacts. You can roll up your sleeves and muck around with your phone from Dashwire, a much happier experience than crouching over your two-inch cell phone screen and tapping or clicking away through on-device management programs, particularly if you're not on the go and are sitting comfortably in front of a computer, thank you very much.
Since Dashwire is linked to your phone via a downloadable client, everything you do online also occurs on your phone, and vice versa. Therefore, you can view, tag, and share media, send text messages, listen to voice mail, and add bookmarks from the comfort of your online dashboard. It's cool. But in the last month, it's gotten cooler.
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Dashwire)
There have been quiet roll-outs of tweaks, even a few big changes. For a start, Dashwire has drastically improved its search tool. Users can now push photos to friends' phones, e-mail addresses, and Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Bebo. (In Twitter, most photos are converted to a TinyURL.com link. It doesn't work 100 percent of the time, and Dashwire's working on that.)
The service also now supports data transferring when users switch phones, which was the top request among private beta testers, and a great new feature for quickly assigning speed dial settings.
The big thing, though, is integration with CallWave, a service that transcribes voice messages to text. This is a smart move, and it makes perfect sense for Dashwire, which is all visual management, to provide visual voice mail.
Coming up
Dashwire will be introducing a few more additions in stages over the next six months. Starting Friday, text messages will be threaded by contact, in a manner much like the iPhone. In about four to six weeks, a new, dynamic phone client will replace the current app, which is currently limited to a few syncing options. The new, richer Dashwire client will peform all sorts of party tricks, like pulling in media when you switch to a new handset, push status updates to Facebook and Twitter, and pull in content from the Web.
The final announcement in this cascade of upgrades is that Symbian S60 users will be able to get their hands on Dashwire if they can hold their horses until late August or early September.
Dashwire runs equally well from your phone memory and storage card, and it's now in public beta for Windows Mobile users. Get out there and try it.
>>See all the latest news in cell phones and mobile software coming out of CTIA Wireless 2008.
Share photos via SMS, e-mail, or post online.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
I've been using the GotVoice (review) voicemail retrieval service for almost a year, and for the most part I've been happy with it. The free system retrieves voicemails that go to my home phone's message box and sends me e-mail links to them. Handy. On Monday, the company is releasing a major update to the service that fixes a few usability snags and adds outbound message utilities.
GotVoice now sends messages in addition to receiving them.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Current users should like the new interface. It's easier to use, and there's finally a "delete" button on each individual message.
The real action is on the outbound side. Now you can record messages on GotVoice and have them sent to any other phone, either as a regular phone call or a "stealth message" (my term for a voice message that goes straight to voicemail without making the phone ring). You can send messages to multiple users at once, even if they're on different phone networks--GotVoice understands how different networks operate. (See also: Pinger.)
Additionally, GotVoice has a nice interface for creating the greeting for your voicemail in-box. You can record a message from your computer's microphone or upload an MP3, or for a fee, construct a "celebrity greeting" from impersonated phrases. The technology is from Veritalk and is not new, but GotVoice's capability to interface with your voicemail systems and install greetings for you is pretty neat.
The company also is building a "visual voicemail" service that will let users manage all their messages from a WAP interface on a mobile phone; in other words, a poor man's iPhone. Carriers (other than Cingular, Apple's reseller for its phone) are interested in this, GotVoice CEO Curt Blake told me.
And now a message from the American president.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I like GotVoice because setting it up and using it requires very little work and no reconfiguring of phones. You just give it your phone numbers and PINs; and it gets to work for you. If you can stand putting in a small effort, though, I highly recommend CallWave (review) as a replacement voicemail system. I'm using it, instead of GotVoice, on my mobile phone and find it to be a better and more complete experience.
If you want to go to the next step and really get your voicemail and e-mail working together, and tie all your phones into one integrated system, then check out Grand Central (CNET.com's review; The New York Times review). It gives you a new phone number that you then have to give to all your contacts, but its capabilities are amazing.
P.S. to CallWave users: GotVoice and CallWave do not play well together. When GotVoice sends a direct message to a cellular phone that's signed up for CallWave, it goes directly to the phone's old voicemail service, not the CallWave message store.
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