CallWave on Thursday introduced its Visual Voicemail widget for Mac OS X v10.4 “Tiger’s” Dashboard software. The widget enables users to see and hear voicemail from their mobile phone, using their computer instead. The basic service is free to use.
The Visual Voicemail widget provides you with a visual notification when new messages arrive. You can view details on new voicemails, including message lengths and time received, then choose which message to listen to first.
CallWave works by routing your cell phone’s voicemail to a CallWave mailbox, which is free to set up and use. You can customize it with your name and a personal message. New messages in your mobile phone’s voicemail box then appear as notifications in the Dashboard widget.
You can listen to them from your computer. You’ll also receive SMS messages on your handset to notify you of new messages. And you can temporarily deactivate the feature whenever you’d like. The Web site also enables you to maintain a list of contacts.
A “CallWave Mobile Pro” service is optionally available for $9.95 per month. That adds call screening, enabling you to hear voicemails as they’re being left, and answer, or transfer the call to a landline phone, as well as toll-free technical support.
The service works with major cell phone carriers including Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile and more than 30 others nationwide.
The news of the Dashboard widget’s release comes shortly after CallWave introduced a similar widget for Yahoo! Widgets, specifically for Windows PCs.