iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Fancy 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, sending text messages, using AT&T features like Caller ID and Call Forwarding, and using a Bluetooth headset or car kit.

Visual Voicemail

Without a doubt, Visual Voicemail is one of the iPhone's big selling points. 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…"

Instead, whenever somebody leaves you a message, the phone wakes up, and a message 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 (Silencer Switch, Volume Keys).

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, or their numbers otherwise.) You can listen to them in any order—you're not forced to listen to your 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 ...