I don’t have a landline. I haven’t for years. That means that whenever I have to give out my phone number on some form, even if I don’t want the person to have my cell number, they get it.
I hate that.
Also, now that I work on Windows Mobile, I have two SIMs with unlimited minute plans on them. But, back when I was on Visual Studio, I had a 1000 minute plan, and sometimes went over.
Well, for people who are in a similar situation to me, some nice free services are filling in those gaps. Skype is now providing free outgoing calls (SkypeOut) from your computer to any real phone number in the US. That satisfies that second problem of going over your minutes. And now AOL has AIMPhoneLine which will give you a free local phone number that has voicemail. It saves the voicemail as an mp3 and sends it to an aim.com email address associated to your screenname. I’ll never use that address for anything, and I’ll never check it. Luckily, they have a setting to send you a text message to your cell when you get a new voicemail.
So, it’s great all around now. If I didn’t have an unlimited voice plan, I’d use the Windows Mobile version of Skype on my HTC Wizard for outgoing calls, and then give out the AIMPhoneLine number to people I don’t actually want to reach me.
Now the world has gotten much better.
I might even start trying out CallWave to get call screening and mp3 voicemail on my primary cellphone, now that I’m trying out all of these other free services.