Cell Phone Vmail
Can someone please explain why I get both a message icon and a text message on my cell phone to tell me I have voice mail?
(And this happens on two different brands of phone each using a different provider.)
I’m sure there’s some logic behind this behaviour — I just can’t figure it out.
May 8th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
The logic is simple, the user model - broken. The provider sets the “has ‘n’ messages” flag on the phone over the network, and the phone does something “for you” (always watch out for that phrase) and alerts you to having a new message. You use your phone to call voicemail, the network clears your message, and removes the message waiting flag from the network. But since the phone does not know whether you listedened to all or any of your messages, it makes you manually clear them rather than be wrong.
May 8th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
My mini-rant wasn’t clear enough.
There are 2 mechanisms being used to tell me I have a message. The first mechanism, the message indicator, works fine. It’s like the message light on my desk phone - it’s only on if there are unheard messages.
The second mechanism is a simple text message that says I have a voicemail (actually, on the Fido network, it’s a text message with the number “18″ — you’re supposed to know that means voice mail!). Since the text message just sits in my inbox until I delete it, it doesn’t automatically go away after I hear the message.
I agree the user model is wrong, but it’s so drastically wrong that I can’t even grasp what the designer was thinking no matter how much I use my engineer’s brain.