HulloMail is good, but is it a short-term answer to Google Voice?

Yesterday I stumbled across HulloMail for the first time. (To reference all my sources correctly, it was through an article in The Register that had been posted on Twitter by @allaboutiphone). In short, HulloMail is a service that diverts your voicemail away from the default offering provided by your mobile phone provider to HulloMail. The primary advantage of such a service is that is offers the next generation of voicemail; something only O2 in the UK through the iPhone can even attempt to match through their Visual Voicemail. Essentially visual voicemail works like email in that it gives you a view of who has left a message and the date/time so you can choose what messages you listen to.

Not subscribing to the O2 pay-monthly iPhone tariff visual voicemail is one of the few features of the iPhone that isn't available to me. HulloMail offers a free workaround of this service, and in my opinion it is already better than the iPhone's offering. Firstly, HulloMail uses Gmail technology to store your voicemail messages as mp3's and then emails them directly to your Inbox. You can access your voicemail from any internet enabled location, even when you don't have your mobile to hand. It also offers a customisable text messaging service which is similar to O2's, in that when you have a new voicemail, it send you an SMS and you can call the phone number (local 01 number too!) and listen to your message. It will also tell you if someone called but didn't leave a message. This doesn't interfere with the missed call function on your iPhone, so a full audit of sent/received calls is still available.

An impressive additional feature is that you can sync your contacts with Google and other providers, so instead of a list of numbers you can see names of people who've left you a message. This sounds straight forward when you consider listening to messages from your phone, but it takes on a different and more impressive function when you're checking your messages through your email! In Gmail, HulloMail will also create and label and label all messages as well; keeping things neat and tidy!

The upshot of this new approach is that your voicemail is now more accessible, with greater control over how you listen to your messages and has the added, and

probably key, benefit of being stored forever and simply to retrieve! It's a bold and innovative move from HulloMail and one that I'm sure will catch on to other, bigger players in the market place before too long. Which brings me to my second point...

Like most people who consider themselves to be cool, but in fact others would probably judge as Geeky or techy, I sign up to a lot of innovative service in the beta stage. (I'm currently waiting either to be invited by Google directly to test Google Wave, or for my invite from a very kind @artinliverpool for the invite they sent me to come through!) One service I was looking forward to getting a sneak preview of was Google Voice. Unfortunately when it did come through I was left disappointed as it's currently only available in beta in the US. (I might change my language settings to US, see if that works!)

From the preview information and marketing copy I can find of Google Voice, it's very similar to HulloMail. However and unfortunately for HulloMail, the list of additional features is also very impressive! In addition to shared features of being able to listen to voicemail on the web and receive notifications via email and SMS, Google offers voicemail transcripts to SMS and email as well as a host of calling features, conference calls, call screening and just about everything else you could wish for! The demo really does look exciting (if you like that sort of thing).

I've always been something of a loyal customer when it comes to technology: not afraid to change, but willing to stick with what I've found good service in the past. In theory that should persuade me to stick with HulloMail over Google Voice, but I suspect I won't. As I've posted about previously, I'm a big Google fan. Not only do I like their approach and the applications and services they produce, but increasingly it is becoming easier to adopt Google's version of the latest technology because I'm using so many other Google applications already! (one notable exception is the Andriod phone, but I'm not ruling it out). People may cite Microsoft as a dangerous precedent, but I believe that Google leant many lessons from how Microsoft developed during the 90's and have built a strategy that tries to ensure they won't repeat their mistakes. Their pricing and commercial model, for example, is so different, they shouldn't be labelled as Monopolists (is that a correct noun?) quite as readily as Microsoft were.

However, no amount of Google praising and reassurances that they will be a 'different' will be of much comfort for the likes of HulloMail. A great, innovative product built by small team of both technical and entrepreneurial minds, but still under a very real threat of trailing in the dirt of the new corporate machine.