I’m very frustrated by the voicemail experience on my daughter’s Gabb phone. It feels entirely like a throwback to how we did things 20 years ago.
With any modern phone I expect voicemail to be integrated into the call history, with at least an option to listen to recorded messages in the same menu as seeing your missed calls. Instead she has to call and navigate a terrible slow voice menu. This feels like it was extra work to make things worse.
Adding to the pain points, there’s no way to know if she has voicemail waiting without calling first, nor is there a way to create a contact for the voicemail line so she can just select and dial it. Apparently the address book doesn’t allow any phone number to be shorter than 10 digits which is baffling given the amount of short codes still in use. And the setup process made it worse. We got stuck trying to enter a 4 digit PIN which the instructions explicitly said was allowed, only to be told that the PIN “cannot include a series of sequential digits” which is complete nonsense. We eventually figured out by trial and error that the PIN had to be a minimum of 6 digits. The process is awful and completely unnecessary to the goals of the phone platform. Why is voicemail so bad??
