Sekiur My Thoughts

As I was driving home from the Blackberry Bold Experience Event last night, I received an upgrade prompt from my Blackberry 8820 for Google Maps. On the way home I upgraded to version 2.3.2 which to my pleasant surprise provided “Street View” giving you the capability of viewing imagery while driving or walking.

Google Maps for mobile makes it easy to see Street View imagery when you’re on the go. View imagery at each turn in driving or walking directions, and study a storefront’s facade so that you don’t pass it up while you’re moving by.

Street View is currently available for BlackBerry and some Java-enabled phones.

Using the trackball you can rotate the view 360 degrees and also expand the “street view” to fit the whole screen.

Watch the video below to see a demo.

If you already have it, then upgrade. If you don’t then you can pick it up by pointing your BlackBerry browser to: www.google.com/gmm

You can click here to fill out a survey and let Google know what you think of Google Maps for BlackBerry.

A couple of years ago I started looking for a way to get voicemails from my mobile to go into my mailbox. Having the capability to store my voicemails and the limitations on 14 days from my provider was really not acceptable.

I found a service called GotVoice, which basically calls your voicemail number and uses your PIN which you enter when opening your account to log in to the provider voicemail system and retrieve the voicemail. You would then get an e-mail with a link to get to your voicemail.

I stopped using it after several months. Having to visit their site to get my voicemail was not attractive and having GotVoice retrieve my voicemail without the opportunity to listen to it on my phone was also a problem.

While surfing the net recently I came across MessageSling, which basically does the same thing but uses a different approach by using the Conditional Call Forwarding feature cell phones have to redirect voicemail to their service.

By dialing a number code you receive after signing up, the registration of all conditional call forwarding returns success, basically changing the If Busy, the If No Reply and the If Not Reachable conditions.

Its interface resembles Gmail giving the ability to tag voicemails with labels.

On September 1st, MessageSling annouced several new features including “Direct to Message”, allowing you to access each particular message by just dialing a number (no pin or call tree to navigate), as well as Group and Greeting Management allowing to have different greetings for different groups of callers.