T-Mobile may not have an official Visual Voicemail service for customers, but PhoneFusion plans to change that—for the Google G1, at least. The app, which was previewed today at the Under The Radar Mobility Conference, is currently available on the Palm, Windows Mobile and Blackberry platforms, and works in a similar fashion as the VV apps on the iPhone and Instinct; the name, number, date and time for each of the messages in your inbox appears on the screen as a list of entries. As far as Android specific details go, there's not much info on the app except that it will appear in the Android Marketplace by the end of the year. [NewsBlaze via IntoMobile]

This announcement from Telstra confuses me: We can already access email on pretty much any mobile phone these days, and I can't picture most people wanting to check their SMS messages on their PC. So what's the deal?

MyConnect is made up of three different parts: My Inbox, which is an online message, contact and calendar management service for all your various messages like email, sms, voicemail etc and is free; My Email which lets you access up to five different email accounts on your mobile for $7 a month (hang on, doesn't the HTC Touch Diamond do that for free?) and MySync, which for $3 a month will backup all your contacts and calendars and synchronise it with MyInbox.

So essentially it's like a MobileMe for Telstra customers. And it costs about the same too - for all the features you're looking at $120 a year.

Aside from the obvious bitching about price, is this something any of you guys would be interested in? Or are there other, better solutions you'd prefer?

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Every office has a pompous windbag or ten that monopolises meeting time with their constant interruptions. And while making fun of those idiots after the fact is a staple of office life, the sad truth is that thousands of hours are lost to these interruptions, and efficiency suffers because of them. Lucky for office life, the brainpower at MIT is hard at work on a series of devices and badges that implement "reality mining" to eliminate these blowhards forever. And no, this has nothing to do with military lasers.

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If there is one thing I can't stand it is getting into long-winded conversations with people on the phone. This is especially true if that person happens to be annoying. If I am forced to initiate the call, I find myself muttering a silent prayer that they won't pick up, but the fact of the matter is that annoying people are always available. The good news is that SlyDial has come up with a solution to this problem with a service that allows the caller to go directly to voicemail.

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We mentioned that there were rumors that Verizon was going to be bringing its own version of visual voicemail out sometime, and now there are further rumblings that this will include visual voicemail on the BlackBerry Storm. This makes the touchscreen, haptic-feedback smartphone sound even more like a real iPhone competitor, wouldn't you say? [Electric Pig]

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PhoneTag, the gang who turns voicemail into text, has "hacked" Google's GrandCentral. The service that consolidates all of your phone numbers into one is useful for people on the go, but its voicemail system is clunky, especially for those needing fast access to messages. That's what makes this hack so clever.

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In what has to be the saddest phone-related story ever, an 80-year-old man spent a part of every day listening to a voicemail recording of his deceased wife saying her name, "Catherine Whiting." Ever since her death in 2005, listening to the recording offered the man a small amount of comfort. However, when his service was upgraded earlier this year, the message was lost.

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Klausner Technologies, a patent holding firm founded by the inventor of the PDA, is suing Apple and AT&T for $US360 million for infringing on its patents with visual voicemail. Its patents cover selectively retrieving messages from a menu displaying the caller's name, number, etc. Yes, they have on patent on that entire concept. Lending credibility to their claim, the suit's filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the McDonald's of patent suits, complete with a drive-thru window.

But what makes this more legit than the average infringement suit - and scary for the big A's - is that they've successfully sued both AOL and Vonage into submission over the same patents. Better still, Apple actually licenced one of Klausner's older patents for an electronic pocket dictionary for the Newton. Takeaway: Klausner has a pretty good shot at digging some coin out of AT&T and Apple's back pockets. Any bets on how long it'll be before they settle? [Apple Insider]

If you have successfully unlocked your iPhone, you may have discovered already that the voicemail button doesn't do anything at all. It won't give you visual voicemail, but you can easily get the voicemail button to work using any carrier following these steps:

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