Quick Review: Webis Voiceminder Beta released - August 3rd

Posted by: Brandon Steili on Aug 04 2006

Thanks to Nowire for the heads up on this release. Here’s the blurb from Alex. I’ve got to agree with his assesment that this is the coolest concept/app I’ve used in a while. Read the extended post for some help with the basic setup & GMail settings…

What is VoiceMinder?

VoiceMinder is a simple solution for those of us who keep track of their task items via email. Currently available for the Pocket PC (soon for SmartPhone), once setup VoiceMinder allows you to quickly record a voice note and have it sent on its way to your email address of choice with just two button presses. No user interface to mess with. No complexities. Just drive/walk/whatever and press the user-configured hotkey to start recording and the hotkey again to stop - instant voice mail!

Honestly - this is the coolest app I’ve used in ages! This beta will expire by August 31st and our plan is to have it available for purchase by mid month. We will also be adding SmartPhone versions soon.

MORE INFO

DOWNLOAD 

Read on for some setup/configuration notes…

Pretty self explainitory settings page. The nice thing is here you don’t need two accounts, you can send and recieve all on the same account. This isn’t something special that Webis has done, but a basic function of SMTP, so don’t let this 2 accounts scare you. Obviously the subject is configurable as you can see above. The hotkey setting leaves a little bit to be desired… just make sure you know which buttons (1, 2, 3, 4 etc) are which. If you don’t know which ones map to which, stop by Start/Settings/Personal/Buttons and figure that out before configuring VoiceMinder.

Clicking on Mail Account gives you:

Now, You’ll notice there’s no option for Secure Connection/Secure Authentication. Well, they don’t appear to show up in landscape mode. Opps!

Now, you’ll notice I have Gmail specified in there. For some reason Gmail says to specifiy port 465 … but it actually connects as follows - Server: smtp.gmail.com Port: 25 **using port 465 causes the connection test to fail.  

Make sure you select Authentication required and feed that dialog your login name and password for gmail. DO NOT use your full GMail email account as your logon name … only the part before the @ sign.

Finally make sure you select Use Secure Connection. The settings are below:

Once that’s all setup, test the connection and you should be good to go. Save the settings (Press OK) and then hit the hotkey you specified … you should now be recording a voiceMail. When you’re done, click Stop and Send. Within a few seconds you should see a new message in your inbox!!!

Very Nice!

Issues I’ve personally seen in the beta:

Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard) button 4 is set to VoiceMinder, but when I go to the buttons configuration (Start/Settings/Buttons) it still shows it to be set for Voice Speed Dial. Not a big deal, but it would be nice to have the Buttons page show the correct mapping. Other than that the application works great using this button.

Mail Test Failure - if I misconfigure the settings, say for Gmail and attempt to run a test of the connection it will fail the connection test as expected. But once it has failed all other functions become non-existant and you are basically forced to quit the application. The other thing that occasionally happens if you fail a connection test is that a notification box will pop up and say the application has failed.

Other issues which have been noted by other users are the same on this device:

Does not initiate a connection by itself. If GPRS is not active it will not attempt to make it active and therefore fails. Especially for phone devices it would be great to have the software be able to auto connect as it needs to.

Cancel - appears to cancel the voicenote, but the application stays active and none of the buttons function. The only thing you can do is exit the application.

Other than that (and those are liveable problems) … this app is great. Nice job by Webis again.

 

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Tags: VoiceMinder, WebIS, Just Another Mobile Monday

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