The Droid 2 has all the usual voicemail capabilities you’d expect built in. You know the drill: Dial in to your voicemail, enter a password, and listen to voice messages. To dial in to voicemail on the Droid 2, tap the Voicemail icon on the Home screen, and you’re ready to go.
Looking for something niftier? The Droid 2 has it—for a price, that is. For $2.99 a month you can use visual voicemail, which lets you see all your voicemails in a simple, chronological list, listen to them in any order you want, delete them, and otherwise manage them. For example, if you’ve got 17 messages, and you want to listen to number 17, you don’t need to listen to the other 16 first. Just tap message 17.
You can turn on visual voicemail either directly from the Droid 2 itself or from your Verizon Wireless account on the Web. If you do it on the Web, log into your account, click Change Features, and then turn on the Visual Voice Mail checkbox. Click Continue.
To save yourself a trip to the Web, on the Droid 2’s Home screen or Application Tray, tap the Voicemail app, and then tap the “Subscribe to Visual Voice Mail” button. After reading through the incomprehensible license agreement gobbledygook, tap Accept.
The next screen tells you that your voicemail inbox isn’t yet set up and asks if you want to go ahead. Tap OK. You get one more screen telling you that you’ll be charged $2.99 per month; tap Subscribe. And then, yes, you’re faced with yet more license agreement gobbledygook. Tap Accept.
Verizon Wireless goes about setting up visual voicemail for you. It should take about 5 minutes. After enough time has elapsed, tap the Voicemail icon. A screen asks you to type your voicemail password. (It’s the same one you use for normal voicemail.) Once you do that, you see a list of your voicemails, in all their visual glory.
The voicemail list shows all your calls in chronological order, including the phone number, date, duration, and time of the call, and a name if it’s available. A blue dot appears next to any call that you haven’t yet played. You use the usual controls to play the message, pause it, and rewind it. It also lets you delete the message or immediately call back.
However, the most important button of all may be the Speaker button. Tap that before you play the call. After all, you’re not holding the phone up to your ear at that point; you’re looking at the phone’s screen; you’ll need the speaker turned on if you want to be able to hear the call.
There’s more you can do, though. When you’re at the screen playing back a call, press the Menu button to do one of the following:
Reply. You get the choice of replying to the message via text messaging, email, or recording a message and sending it directly to the person’s voicemail.
Forward. As with Reply, you can forward the message via text messaging, email, or recorded message.
Archive. You can save the message as an audio file, which is saved on your Droid 2’s SD card, in the /sdcard/Voicemails folder. Make sure to name the file, because if you don’t, the Droid 2 will create a cryptic file name consisting of more than 20 numbers, the first being the phone number of the person who left you the voicemail.
If you’re a Mr. or Ms. Popularity who gets tons of voicemails, good on you. But dealing with that long list of voicemails can be daunting. Luckily, the Droid 2 gives you some nice tools for managing them all. Press the Menu key on your voicemail list, and you get these options:
Sort by. You can sort your list in a number of ways, including by date, whether you’ve heard the messages or not, their priority, and so on. Just choose the way you want to sort from the list, and your calls will be reordered.
Compose. Lets you record a message and then send it by phone to someone’s voicemail.
Select Multiple. Tap this button to select multiple messages and then delete or archive them in one fell swoop.
Settings. Customize your use of visual voicemail in more ways than you can imagine.
More. From here, you can delete all your voicemails at once, log out of voicemail, or unsubscribe from the service.
There may come a time, believe it or not, when you and your Droid 2 are briefly parted. That doesn’t mean, though, that you can’t check your voicemail. You won’t be able to check it visually, of course, but you will be able to do it the old-fashioned way—by voice.
From any phone, dial your Droid 2’s phone number, and then press the # key. Then enter your password followed the # key, and the friendly voice gives you the rundown of the things you can do with your voicemail:
Press 1 to hear your messages.
Press 2 to send a message.
Press 4 to change your voicemail options.
Press * to disconnect.
At the end of a message, or while you’re still listening to it, you can do the following:
Press 7 to delete the message.
Press 9 to save the message.
For even more options, press 0. You can get detailed information about the call, such as the time and date it was sent, and its duration. You can also replay the message, and send a copy of it to someone else, including remarks you record about it.
Tip
If you like to check voicemail the old-fashioned way, you can do so from your Droid 2. On the dialer (Dialing a Call) press and hold the 1 key. You then dial into voicemail, and get the same options as if you were calling your voicemail from another phone.