One of the oh-so-cute features of the iPhone is visual voicemail, the “duh” feature of showing you an actual on-screen list of your voicemails instead of making you sit through voice prompts.
Bad: My iPhone mysteriously reverted to the classic “press 7 to delete” system when I changed rate plans a couple weeks ago… with voice mail disabled altogether so callers couldn’t leave messages until I noticed it and set up a new password.
A little Googling indicates this is a fairly common mix-up, and the only way to restore visual voicemail is to call AT&T tech support and have them fiddle with your account settings.
Good: AT&T tech support was able to fix the account settings so it works again… after a half hour on hold… :)
WTF: The AT&T tech swore that visual voicemail doesn’t work if you have a WiFi connection active. He had me disable WiFi while initially testing it, then when I asked him about it he told me outright that Visual Voicemail only works on the EDGE network and therefore you must turn off WiFi to check your voicemail.
This is demonstrably false; just to confirm I hadn’t been crazy for the couple of months my voicemail was working just fine, I turned WiFi back on, left myself a voicemail, and retrieved it just fine in all its visual glory.
It’s entirely possible that the voicemails still download over EDGE, but having the WiFi up doesn’t seem to interfere at all.
Now if they can just add a feature to route phone calls over WiFi, I could actually get calls through from my flat. ;)