Manage Calls, E-Mail With One Service

Have you ever wished your phone were smart enough to automatically try reaching you at all your numbers--office, cell, home--so you wouldn't miss crucial calls that went to the wrong location? That's the objective of recent services from SBC Communications and Verizon, which take advantage of the Web to offer a host of call-management and universal inbox features for standard landlines.

To access the Iobi Home service by Verizon, users log in via a desktop program or, in some cases, via the Web or a telephone. You can see a list of recent calls, schedule call forwarding, receive real-time notice of calls and voice mail coming to your home phone even when you are at the office, play back voice mail on a PC, and forward messages as e-mail attachments. You can sync Iobi's address book and calendar with Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, or Palm Desktop. Verizon users in New England (except Connecticut) and New York can subscribe now, and the service should be in more areas shortly. It costs $8 per month.

Available to any SBC customer, the Unified Communications service lets you access e-mail, voice mail (from one landline and two Cingular wireless phones), and fax messages via the Web or by telephone; and like Iobi it permits you to forward voice mail as an e-mail attachment. It costs $13 per month (or $8 monthly without wireless integration).

Ins and Outs

We tested both services and found them intuitive and easy to use, with fast and simple setup. Nevertheless, we did run into a couple of glitches. Iobi constantly prompted us to upgrade to a newer version, but when we tried to upgrade, the application quit. This happened repeatedly until we uninstalled and then reinstalled the software. SBC's service worked well, except when we tried to download e-mail from an IMAP-based Mailblocks account. It crashed, and thereafter we couldn't download mail from the account. SBC told us that this was potentially due to a corrupted e-mail and that there are some known issues with e-mail collection.

Universal inboxes are not new. Services appeared in the late 1990s promising one inbox with access to e-mail, voice mail, and faxes--but they didn't catch on. Both of today's services, however, go beyond a basic universal inbox. The killer feature, already offered by SBC and in the works from Verizon, is wireless integration with a complete find-me/follow-me service for calls, says Wu Zhou, an analyst with research firm IDC.

VoIP providers--and many phone companies--can't offer this type of wireless integration because they don't control cellular networks and can't retrieve calls forwarded there. That points to the big catch with wireless integration: You must get your cellular service from the same company that provides your landline and call-management service.

Calling Plans

Verizon plans to launch a professional and enterprise version of its service in early 2005. It also intends to add new features that will let you block specific calls and view additional landlines in one mailbox, for example. SBC, meanwhile, plans to integrate its service with its upcoming consumer VoIP service, due in the first quarter of 2005.

We liked Iobi's ability to notify users at a work PC of calls to a home phone. And SBC's wireless integration is impressive. Both services are pricey, however; and for now, each seems to lack at least one feature the other already offers.