Screen Calls on your Cell Phone
This is not a paid advertisement. I'm just a happy customer.
Wow - this is great. I'm really busy, and shouldn't be spending time writing this, but it's just to cool to not pass along. As you probably know, cell phone service does not offer caller ID. If you think you have caller ID, what you really have is "Address Book Lookup".
When I call your cell from my office, and I'm not already in your phone book, you just see (480) 424-6952 on your screen, and have no idea who it is. If you're on a land line, you'll also see "myKB.com, Inc." on the screen.
I'm not into caller ID to know the difference, but I'm sure there is some technological short coming to why the name portion of caller ID is not included on cellular service.
Enter CallWave.com
CallWave is a replacement for your voice mail system, that I've written about before. It's an amazing service that emails your voice mail, as MP3 attachments. They also text you a dictated version of the voice mail, which they call a "Gist". The SMS text is never accurate to the word, but you can always get the idea of the voice mail - as well as the gist of the message - hence the name.
In the Email, and the SMS, the name portion of the caller ID is included as well, which is a nice feature.
And now - something that I've never been able to do before is possible because of CallWave.com.
Call Screening.
What do I do with these unknown number and blocked number calls? I send them to my CallWave.com voice mail. The CallWave server, speed dials me back, and while the caller is listening to my "Please leave me a message" - I have time to answer the call back from CallWave.
Then I hear the message you're leaving, while you're leaving it, and if I press 1 at anytime, we're connected.
HOW COOL IS THAT?
Here's the down side. CallWave.com is no longer free - but with all this functionality I'm still a big fan.