Just read on Teltarif today that Vodafone Germany has launched a new product called "Visual Mailbox". Instead of saving voice mail messages on a central server the visual mailbox feature forwards voice mail messages via MMS to the subscriber. MMS is the multimedia cousin of the SMS message and can carry text, pictures and, quite useful for this service in particular, audio files. The advantage: The user does not have to call the voice mail system anymore but listen to voice messages by selecting an MMS message in the incoming messages folder of the mobile phone. Reminds me of the voice mail functionality of the iPhone.
Vodafone Germany offers the service for no additional charge. How nice 🙂