How To Reply To A Voicemail On Iphone

Chapter 4. Voicemail, Texting, & Other Phone Tricks

Once you've savored the exhilaration of making phone calls on the iPhone, you're ready to graduate to some of its fancier tricks: voicemail, text messages, AT&T features like Caller ID and Call Forwarding, and a Bluetooth headset or car kit.

Visual Voicemail

On the iPhone, you don't dial in to check for answering-machine messages people have left for you. You don't enter a password. You don't sit through some Ambien-addled recorded lady saying, "You have…17…messages. To hear your messages, press 1. When you have finished, you may hang up…."

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Instead, whenever somebody leaves you a message, the phone wakes up, and a notice on the screen lets you know who the message is from. You also hear a sound, unless you've turned that option off (Brightness) or turned on the silencer switch.

That's your cue to tap Home→Phone→Voicemail. There you see all your messages in a tidy chronological list. (The list shows the callers' names if they're in your Contacts list; otherwise it shows their numbers.) You can listen to them in any order—you're not forced to listen to three long-winded friends before discovering that there's an urgent message from your boss. It's a game-changer.

Setup

To access your voicemail, tap Phone on the Home screen, and then tap Voicemail on the Phone screen.

The very first time you visit this screen, the iPhone prompts you to make up a numeric password for your voicemail account—don't worry, you'll never have to enter it again—and to record a "Leave me a message" greeting.

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You have two options for the outgoing greeting.

Default . If you're microphone-shy, or if you're famous and you don't want stalkers and fans calling just to hear your famous voice, then use this option. It's a prerecorded, somewhat uptight female voice that says, "Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. 212-661-7837 is not available." Beep !
Custom . This option lets you record your own voice saying, for example, "You've reached my iPhone. You may begin drooling at the tone." Tap Record, hold the iPhone to your head, say your line, and then tap Stop.

Check how it sounds by tapping Play.

Then just wait for your fans to start leaving you messages!

Using Visual Voicemail

In the voicemail list, a blue dot indicates a message you haven't yet played.

Tip

You can work through your messages even when you're out of AT&T cellular range—on a plane, for example—because the recordings are stored on the iPhone itself.

There are only two tricky things to learn about Visual Voicemail:

Tap a message's name twice to play it . That's a deviation from the usual iPhone Way, where just one tap does the trick. In Visual Voicemail, tapping a message just selects it and activates the Call Back and Delete buttons at the bottom of the screen. You have to tap twice to start playback.
Turn on Speaker Phone first . As the name Visual Voicemail suggests, you're looking at your voicemail list—which means you're not holding the phone up to your head. The first time people try using Visual Voicemail, therefore, they generally hear nothing!

That's a good argument for hitting the Speaker button before tapping messages that you want to play back. That way, you can hear the playback and continue looking over the list. (Of course, if privacy is an issue, you can also double-tap a message and then quickly whip the phone up to your ear.)

Note

If you're listening through the earbuds or a Bluetooth earpiece or car kit, of course, you hear the message playing back through that . If you really want to listen through the iPhone's speaker instead, tap Audio, then Speaker Phone. (You switch back the same way.)

Everything else about Visual Voicemail is straightforward. The buttons do exactly what they say:

Delete . The Voicemail list scrolls with a flick of your finger, but you still might want to keep the list manageable by deleting old messages. To do that, tap a message and then tap Delete. The message disappears instantly. (You're not asked to confirm.)

Tip

The iPhone hangs on to old messages for 30 days—even ones you've deleted. To listen to deleted messages that are still on the phone, scroll to the bottom of the list and tap Deleted Messages.

On the Deleted screen, you can Undelete a message that you actually don't want to lose yet (that is, move it back to the Voicemail screen) or tap Clear All to erase these messages for good.
Call Back . Tap a message and then tap Call Back to return the call. Very cool—you never even encounter the person's phone number.
Rewind, Fast Forward . Drag the little white ball in the scroll bar (beneath the list) to skip backward or forward in the message. It's a great way to replay something you didn't catch the first time.
Greeting . Tap this button (upper-left corner) to record your voicemail greeting.
Call Details . Tap the button to open the Info screen for the message that was left for you. Here you'll find out the date and time of the message.

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If it was left by somebody who's in your Contacts list, you can see which of that person's phone numbers the call came from (indicated in blue type), plus a five-pointed star if that number is in your Favorites list. Oh, and you can add this person to your Favorites list at this point by tapping Add to Favorites.

If the caller's number isn't in Contacts, then you're shown the city and state where that person's phone is registered. And you'll be offered a Create New Contact button and an Add to Existing Contact button, so you can store it for future reference.

In both cases, you also have the option to return the call (right from the Info screen) or fire off a text message.

Dialing in for Messages

Gross and pre-iPhonish though it may sound, you can also dial in for your messages from another phone. (Hey, it could happen.)

To do that, dial your iPhone's number. Wait for the voicemail system to answer.

As your own voicemail greeting plays, dial *, your voicemail password, and then #. You'll hear the Uptight AT&T Lady announce the first "skipped" message (actually the first unplayed message), and then she'll start playing them for you.

After you hear each message, she'll offer you the following options (but you don't have to wait for her to announce them):

To delete the message, press 7.
To save it, press 9.
To replay it, press 4.
To hear the date, time, and number the message came from, press 5. (You don't hear the lady give you these last two options until you press "zero for more options"—but they work anytime you press them.)

Tip

If this whole Visual Voicemail thing freaks you out, you can also dial in for messages the old-fashioned way, right from the iPhone. Open the Keypad (Voice Dialing (iPhone 3GS)) and hold down the 1 key, just as though it's a speed-dial key on any normal phone.

After a moment, the phone connects to AT&T; you're asked for your password, and then the messages begin to play back, just as described above.

Text Messages (SMS)

"Texting," as the young whippersnappers call it, was huge in Asia and Europe before it began catching on in the United States. These days, however, it's increasingly popular, especially among teenagers and twentysomethings.

SMS stands for Short Messaging Service. An SMS text message is a very short note (under 160 characters—a sentence or two) that you shoot from one cellphone to another. What's so great about it?

Like a phone call, it's immediate. You get the message off your chest right now.
As with email, the recipient doesn't have to answer immediately. The message waits for him even when his phone is turned off.
Unlike a phone call, it's nondisruptive. You can send someone a text message without worrying that he's in a movie, a meeting, or anywhere else where talking and holding a phone up to the head would be frowned upon. (And the other person can answer nondisruptively, too, by sending a text message back .)
You have a written record of the exchange. There's no mistaking what the person meant. (Well, at least not because of sound quality. Whether or not you can understand the texting shorthand culture that's evolved from people using no-keyboard cellphones to type English words—"C U 2morrO," and so on—is another matter entirely.)

The original iPhone service plan came with 200 free text messages a month; the base iPhone 3G and 3GS plans don't come with any. You can pay $5 a month for those 200 messages, or pay more for more. Remember that you use up one of those 200 each time you send or receive a message.

The same rules and pricing apply to picture and video messages (known as MMS, or multimedia messaging service), which AT&T finally launched for the iPhone in the late summer of 2009.

Receiving a Text Message

When you get an SMS, the iPhone plays a quick marimba riff and displays the name or number of the sender and the message, in a translucent message rectangle. If you're using the iPhone at the time, you can tap Ignore (to keep doing what you were doing) or View (to open the message).

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Otherwise, if the iPhone was asleep, it wakes up and displays the message right on its Unlock screen. You have to unlock the phone and then open the Messages program manually. Tap the very first icon in the upper-left corner of the Home screen.

Tip

The Text icon on the Home screen bears a little circled number "badge," letting you know how many new text messages are waiting for you.

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Either way, the look of Messages (which was called Text before the iPhone 3.0 software) might surprise you. It resembles iChat, Apple's chat program for Mac, in which incoming text messages and your replies are displayed as though they're cartoon speech balloons.

Tip

The last 50 exchanges appear here. If you want to see even older ones, scroll to the very top and tap Load Earlier Messages.

To respond to the message, tap in the text box at the bottom of the screen. The iPhone keyboard appears. Type away, and then tap Send. Assuming your phone has cellular coverage, the message gets sent off immediately.

And if your buddy replies, then the balloon-chat continues, scrolling up the screen. Don't forget to turn the iPhone 90 degrees for a bigger, wider keyboard!

Tip

If all this fussy typing is driving you nuts, you can always just tap the big fat Call button to conclude the transaction by voice.

The Text List

What's cool is that the iPhone retains all these exchanges. You can review them or resume them at any time by tapping Messages on the Home screen. A list of text message conversations appears; a blue dot indicates conversations that contain new messages.

Tip

If you've sent a message to a certain group of people, you can pre-address a new note to the same group by tapping the old message's row here.

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The truth is, these listings represent people , not conversations. For example, if you had a text message exchange with Chris last week, a quick way to send a new text message (on a totally different subject) to Chris is to open that "conversation" and simply send a "reply." The iPhone saves you the administrative work of creating a new message, choosing a recipient, and so on.

If having these old exchanges hanging around presents a security (or marital) risk, you can delete one in either of two ways:

From the Text Messages list : Swipe away the conversation. Just swipe your finger horizontally across the conversation's name (either direction). That makes the Delete confirmation button appear immediately.
From within a conversation's speech-balloons screen : Tap Edit to open the message-deletion screen. Here you can delete all the exchanges simultaneously (tap Clear All) or vaporize only particularly incriminating messages. To do that, tap the round buttons for the individual balloons you want to nuke; then tap Delete (2) (or whatever number the button says). Tap Done.

Note

Interestingly, you can also forward some messages you've selected in this way. When you tap the Forward button, a new outgoing text message appears, ready for you to specify the new recipient.

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Sending a New Message

If you want to text somebody you've texted before, the quickest way, as noted above, is simply to resume one of the "conversations" already listed in the Text Messages list.

But options to fire off a text message are lurking all over the iPhone. A few examples:

In the Messages program . From the Home screen, tap Messages. The iPhone opens the complete list of messages you've received. Tap the button at the top-right corner of the screen to open a new text message window, with the keyboard ready to go.

Address it by typing a few letters of the recipient's name and then choosing from the list of matches. Or tap the button, which opens your Contacts list. Tap the person you want to text.

Note

Your entire Contacts list appears here, even ones with no cellphone numbers. But you can't text somebody who doesn't have a cellphone number.
In the Contacts, Recents, or Favorites lists . Tap a person's name in Contacts, or next to a listing in Recents or Favorites, to open the Info screen; tap Text Message. In other words, sending a text message to anyone whose cellphone number lives in your iPhone is only two taps away.
From Photos or Voice Memos . Whenever you see a (Share) button—when you're looking at a photo or a video in Photos, for example, or when you tap the button in Voice Memos—the usual list of sending options appears. It usually includes Email, MobileMe—and MMS. Tapping MMS sends you back to Messages, where the photo, video, or audio file is ready to send. (More on multimedia messages shortly.)

You can now tap that button again to add another recipient for this same message (or tap the button to type in a phone number). Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary; they'll all get the same message.

In any case, the skinny little text message composition screen is waiting for you now. You're ready to type and send!

Tip

Links that people send you in text messages actually work. For example, if someone sends you a Web address, tap it with your finger to open it in Safari. If someone sends a street address, tap it to open it in Google Maps. And if someone sends a phone number, tap it to dial.

Picture, Audio, or Video Messages

Man, we waited long enough for this. It was absolutely bizarre that, for all its other superpowers, the iPhone could not send photos to other cellphones, let alone audio clips or video clips. This feature—called MMS (multimedia messaging service) was on every cellphone on earth, even the $20 starter phones. But not on the iPhone.

The iPhone 3.0 software finally brought this ability to the iPhone 3G and 3GS. (Sadly, the original iPhone shall remain MMS-less.) It took AT&T a few months to catch up and turn on the feature ("by the end of the summer 2009," they kept saying), but it was worth the wait.

To send a photo or (on the iPhone 3GS) a video, tap the icon next to the box where you type your text messages (shown on the facing page at right). Two buttons appear: Take Photo or Choose Existing. (On the iPhone 3GS, the first button says Take Photo or Video instead.)

If you want to transmit a photo or video that's already on your phone, then tap Choose Existing; your Photos app opens automatically, showing all your photos and videos. Tap the one you want and then tap Choose. If you choose Take Photo or Video instead, then your Camera app opens so you can take a new picture or (on the iPhone 3GS) snag a video clip.

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In any case, you now return to your SMS conversation in progress—but now that photo or video appears inside the Send box. Type a caption or comment, if you like. Then tap Send to fire it off to your buddy.

Capturing Text-Message Goodies

In general, text messages are fleeting; most people have no idea how they might capture them and save them forever. Copy and Paste helps with that. (So does the amazing Google Voice service, but that's another conversation.)

Some of the stuff in those text messages is easy to capture, though. For example, if you're on the receiving end of an MMS photo or video, tap the small preview in the speech bubble. It opens at full-screen size so you can have a better look at it—and if it's a video, there's even a ► button so you can play it. Either way, if the picture or video is good enough to preserve, tap the button. You're offered a Save Image button; tap it to add it to your iPhone's collection. (If you have a 3GS, you can also save a video—but tap Save Video, of course.)

If someone sends you contact information (name and address, for example), you can add it to your Address Book. Just tap inside that bubble, and then tap either Create New Contact or Add to Existing Contact.

Free Text Messaging

Text messaging is awesome. Paying for text messaging, not so much.

Fortunately, there are all kinds of sneaky ways to do text messaging for free. Yes, you read that right: free. Here are a couple of examples:

Solution #1: FreeMMS. It's an app, of course. A $1 program from the App Store (Chapter 12) that really, truly works. It lets you send unlimited text messages—no, even better, picture messages—for free.

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There are only two small gotchas. First, you have to specify the callee's cellphone company (Verizon, AT&T, or whatever), which you don't always know. Second, replies come to your iPhone as email messages, so you're deprived of that nice chat-room/balloon conversational effect. But come on, man—you're saving 20 cents per message forever!

Solution #2: Use the AIM chat program described in the next section. Create a buddy whose address is, for example, +12125561212 (your friend's cellphone number). Any message you send to that address arrives as a text message—free to you. (This technique has a key advantage: Your buddy can actually reply .)

Chat Programs

The iPhone doesn't come with any chat programs, like AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), Yahoo Messenger, or MSN Messenger. But installing one yourself—like AIM, below—is simple, as described in Chapter 12.

There are also apps like Beejive that let you chat away with your buddies no matter what chat network they're on.

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Call Waiting

Call Waiting has been around for years. With a call waiting feature, when you're on one phone call, you hear a beep indicating that someone else is calling in. You can tap the Flash key on your phone—if you know which one it is—to answer the second call while you put the first one on hold.

Some people don't use call waiting because it's rude to both callers. Others don't use it because they have no idea what the Flash key is.

On the iPhone, when a second call comes in, the phone rings (and/or vibrates) as usual, and the screen displays the name or number of the caller, just as it always does. Buttons on the screen offer you three choices:

Ignore . The incoming call goes straight to voicemail. Your first caller has no idea that anything's happened.
Hold Call + Answer . This button gives you the traditional call waiting effect. You say, "Can you hold on a sec? I've got another call," to the first caller. The iPhone puts her on hold, and you connect to the second caller. At this point, you can jump back and forth between the two calls, or you can merge them into a conference call, just as described on Hold.
End Call + Answer . Tapping this button hangs up on the first call and takes the second one.

If Call Waiting seems a bit disruptive all the way around, you can turn it off; see Call Waiting. When Call Waiting is turned off, incoming calls go straight to voicemail when you're on the phone.

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Call Forwarding

Here's a pretty cool feature you may not have even known you had. It lets you route all calls made to your iPhone number to a different number. How is this useful? Let us count the ways:

When you're home. You can have your cellphone's calls ring your home number so you can use any extension in the house, and so you don't miss any calls while the iPhone is turned off or charging.
When you send your iPhone to Apple for battery replacement (Out-of-Warranty Repairs), you can forward the calls you would have missed to your home or work phone number.
When you're overseas, you can forward the number to one of the Web-based services that answers your voicemail and sends it to you as an email attachment (like GrandCentral.com or CallWave.com).
When you're going to be in a place with little or no AT&T cell coverage (Alaska, say), you can have your calls forwarded to your hotel or a friend's cellphone. (Forwarded calls eat up your allotment of minutes, though.)

You have to turn on Call Forwarding while you're still in an area with AT&T coverage. Start at the Home screen. Tap Settings→Phone→Call Forwarding, turn Call Forwarding on, and then tap in the new phone number. That's all there is to it—your iPhone will no longer ring.

At least not until you turn the same switch off again.

Caller ID

Caller ID is another classic cellphone feature. It's the one that displays the phone number of the incoming call (and sometimes the name of the caller).

The only thing worth noting about the iPhone's own implementation of Caller ID is that you can prevent your number from appearing when you call other people's phones. From the Home screen, tap Settings→Phone→Show MyCaller ID, and then tap the On/Off switch.

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Bluetooth Earpieces and Car Kits

The iPhone has more antennas than an ant colony: seven for the cellular networks, one for Wi-Fi hot spots, one for GPS, and one for Bluetooth.

Bluetooth is a short-range wireless cable elimination technology. It's designed to untether you from equipment that would ordinarily require a cord. Bluetooth crops up in computers (print from a laptop to a Bluetooth printer), in game consoles (like Sony's wireless PlayStation controller), and above all, in cellphones.

There are all kinds of things Bluetooth can do in cellphones, like transmitting cameraphone photos to computers, wirelessly syncing your address book from a computer, or letting the phone in your pocket serve as a wireless Internet antenna for your laptop. But the iPhone can do only one Bluetooth thing: hands-free calling.

To be precise, it works with those tiny wireless Bluetooth earpieces, of the sort you see clipped to people's ears, as well as with cars with Bluetooth phone systems. If your car has one of these "car kits" (Acura, Prius, and many other models include them), you hear the other person's voice through your stereo speakers, and there's a microphone built into your steering wheel or rearview mirror. You keep your hands on the wheel the whole time.

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Note

This discussion covers monaural Bluetooth earpieces intended for phone calls. But the iPhone can also handle Bluetooth stereo headphones, intended for music. Details are on Bluetooth Stereo Headphones.

Pairing with a Bluetooth Earpiece

So far, Bluetooth hands-free systems have been embraced primarily just by the world's geeks for one simple reason: It's way too complicated to pair the earpiece (or car) with the phone.

So what's pairing? That's the system of "marrying" a phone to a Bluetooth earpiece, so that each works only with the other. If you didn't do this pairing, then some other guy passing on the sidewalk might hear your conversation through his earpiece. And you probably wouldn't like that.

The pairing process is different for every cellphone and every Bluetooth earpiece. Usually it involves a sequence like this:

On the earpiece, turn on Bluetooth. Make the earpiece discoverable . Discoverable just means that your phone can "see" it. You'll have to consult the earpiece's instructions to learn how to do so.
On the iPhone, tap Home→Settings→General→Bluetooth. Turn Bluetooth to On . The iPhone immediately begins searching for nearby Bluetooth equipment. If all goes well, you'll see the name of your earpiece show up on the screen.
Tap the earpiece's name. Type in the passcode . The passcode is a number, usually four or six digits, that must be typed into the phone within about a minute. You have to enter this only once, during the initial pairing process. The idea is to prevent some evildoer sitting nearby in the airport waiting lounge, for example, to secretly pair his earpiece with your iPhone.

The user's manual for your earpiece should tell you what the passcode is.

When you're using a Bluetooth earpiece, you dial using the iPhone itself (unless you're using voice dialing, of course). You generally use the iPhone's own volume controls, too. You generally press a button on the earpiece itself to answer an incoming call, to swap call waiting calls, and to end a call.

If you're having any problems making a particular earpiece work, Google it. Type "iPhone Motorola H800 earpiece," for example. Chances are good that you'll find a writeup by somebody who's worked through the setup and made it work.

Car Kits

The iPhone works beautifully with Bluetooth car kits, too. The pairing procedure generally goes exactly as described above: You make the car discoverable, enter the passcode on the iPhone, and then make the connection.

Once you're paired up, you can answer an incoming call by pressing a button on your steering wheel, for example. You make calls either from the iPhone or, in some cars, by dialing the number on the car's own touchscreen.

Note

When Bluetooth is turned on but the earpiece isn't, or when the earpiece isn't nearby, the icon appears in gray. Oh—and when it's connected and working right, the earpiece's battery gauge appears on the iPhone's status bar.

Of course, studies show that it's the act of driving while conversing that causes accidents—not actually holding a phone. So the hands-free system is less for safety than for convenience and compliance with state laws.