iPhone: The Missing Manual, 7th Edition

Chapter 5. Voicemail, Texting & Other 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, text messages, cell-company features like caller ID and call forwarding, and a Bluetooth headset or car kit.

Visual Voicemail

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 notice on the screen lets you know who the message is from. You also hear a sound, unless you’ve turned that option off in Settings or turned on the silencer switch.

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; otherwise it shows their numbers.) You can listen to them in any order—you’re not forced to listen to 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 tap Voicemail on the Phone screen.

The very first time you visit this screen, the iPhone prompts you to make up a numeric password for your voicemail account—don’t worry, you’ll never have to enter it ...