Thursday, May 26th, 2011 at 10:26 PM EST

Once upon a time I had a regular landline and an answering machine. The only nice thing about it was that I could listen to someone leaving a message and only pick up the phone if I wished to. The “not nice” part was what happened if I wasn’t home – which after all is really what an answering machine is for.

What happened? Well, people left messages … but I never knew it until I got home and saw the little light flashing. Then came voicemail. Same story, except now I couldn’t even monitor the calls except with a few very pricey desk phones. Of course I could always call my home number or a voicemail number and enter a code to play back my messages … but who wants to do that every hour or two?

These days, though, we have VoIP and smart phones. So if someone leaves me a message on my Phone.com voice mailbox notification is sent by eMail, which shows up on my shiny new Windows 7 Phone no matter where in the world I am. And joy, I can even get the message wherever I am.

Even if you cannot hear the message, no need to worry, we’re finally at the point where for a very nominal charge the voicemail can be turned into text!

Stuart Zipper is the past Senior Editor of TelecomWeb news break and a contributing editor to Communications Technology.