Phone Phun

Sure, you get voicemail as part of your cell phone service plan, but is it really taking care of business? If you're tired of your important messages getting deleted after only a week or two, you're probably looking for a better solution.

MessageSling is a free service that replaces your wireless carrier's voicemail service. They provide unlimited storage, which means that you won't have to worry about that important message being deleted just before you need to retrieve it. In addition, they keep track of where all your calls came from, adding them automatically to your contact list. When a new message comes in, they'll text you, giving you a special number to call to retrieve that message—no more listening to the last ten messages just to get to the newest one.

While the basic service is free, we're sure they'd love to sell you some add-ons, including the ability to transcribe your messages.

How'd you like to make free long distance calls? What about international calls? Talkster lets you do just that.

Sign up for a free number at the Talkster web site. You enter your phone number and the number of the person you're trying to call, and Talkster spits back two local numbers, one for you and one for your friend. If you're in LA, you call your west coast phone number, and it'll ring through on your east coast friend's phone. They then call their local number, and through some telephonic magic, you're connected to one another and can talk as long as you like. You can up the ante by using this save service to call folks in dozens of countries around the world, or even to set up group calls. So what's the catch? You have to listen to a ten second ad at the beginning of your call, and you can only hook up five people at once. That's not much inconvenience when you figure what long distance and international calls can cost you.

Talkster is a free service.