Phone.com, two new products that I like

Dear friends,

Phone.com listens to customers and constantly improve the user experience by adding new convenient services. It is the truth regardless of the fact that I work there.

Today Phone.com introduce two new Mobile Phone Apps:

Phone.com - Mobile Office (fo Android) and Phone.com - Mobile VoIP (for iPhone)

Phone.com Mobile Office is my favorite, it is available for all Android phone users. It can be downloaded free of charge directly from the Android Market. Calls can then be placed from your cell phone but using your Phone.com phone number.

You do not need to dial differently or do anything different with the phone i.e. seamless integration.

It is easy to miss how important and how powerful that feature is for your personal productivity and lifestyle. You no longer have to tell people your cell phone number. This is huge, not because you keep your privacy and really keep the cell phone number for emergencies, but because you now get back control over your life. You can block unwanted calls forever, this is by itself something I learned to appreciate just lately as I have started blocking calls on my Home Phone which is also part of the same Phone.com Virtual Office system.

Another feature which I like in the Phone.com - Mobile Office, is that you can do the same trick spoken above with SMS. Yes, you can send SMS from your phone without showing your cell phone caller ID. And surprise surprise, you can even be text back on the same number which is again your office number.

Among all that Mobile Office also gives easy access to your transcribed voicemail messages, Faxes and SMS messages with the click of a button.

And your own conference bridge accessible with one click.

I am now completely torn. I do not like Apple that much (too arrogant of a company for me, reminding me of Microsoft when they were on the top), but, I have to admit I like the iPhone so far (almost perfect UI even compared to the new Android phones). On the other hand I like the Android approach and the openness. After all, making the same level of application as the Phone.com - Mobile office on the iPhone with seamless integration to all the phone operations (as in the android) is just impossible on the iPhone.

One thing to note is that the Mobile Office app is not a VoIP application it uses your mobile minutes as if you made a regular call but it can sure save you on international dialing. It does enjoy all the new power of Phone.com VoIP back-end.

The app supports all Phone.com services, Virtual Office, Virtual Number and even your Home Phone Plus service.

The second Mobile app that came out today is for iPhone it is called Phone.com - Mobile VoIP

Phone.com - Mobile VoIP allows you to place calls from the iPhone using your Phone.com phone number as your caller ID. Now available at no cost from the iPhone app store the Mobile VoIP app is available to any Phone.com Virtual Office customer. Simply add an iPhone Extension within your Phone.com account, and bypass the use of your mobile minutes (data minutes will apply when using a 3G connection).

This is good when you travel, imagine making international calls from your Wifi connection in your hotel in Panama. I have done it and I can not tell you how much I saved. How about 4Cent a minute for a call from Panama to the US instead of $1.5 per minute. Simply unimaginable savings.

The nice thing is that it also work in 3G so you can mask your cell caller ID wherever you are.

Since it is an extension of your Virtual Office you can use your Phone.com number to make calls where you want to hide your Cell phone number. You can even receive calls to your Phone.com number even if the app is not running since you can make the Virtual Office call your cell as well as your iPhone extension. So all in all a different but also a very powerful tool by itself and it even works on the iPad.

However the app can not stay running in the background even with the new iPhone OS since apple is still not a real multitasking OS. The future will show if Phone.com - Mobile VoIP applications and other like it will be able to have Apple change, but I doubt it will be the case.

Ohh, the app is free to download but will cost you a whooping one time fee of $3.88 :), for the creation of the iPhone extension on your virtual office account. True value in my book.

Thanks

Alon