On a recent weekend, we took a small road trip, and spent a couple of days in the Sierra Nevada mountains where there was cell coverage only in the small community of Graeagle, California. We drove through town periodically on our way from here to there (forest, desert, historic trains, and rivers to visit). We passed through town several times each day.

With push email on my iPhone every time we drove through town my phone automatically collected any incoming email, and if I paused to reply, sent out the reply only having to make sure that the message got to the network—the network would take care of getting it to its target. Everything worked as designed. Later, if I didn’t respond immediately, I could review the email messages, and craft replies as appropriate, even though I was offline.

What was annoying was the way my voice messages were handled. My iPhone has visual voicemail (which is great as an incremental improvement), so voicemail messages also came in as I went through Graeagle. I could listen to them, but I couldn’t respond, unless I parked and sat still in Graeagle holding on to the narrow band of live coverage. With email I can craft a response without network to go out when network is good—not so with voice.

On one pass through town, Mary and I both collected a couple of voice messages, one concerning a possible immediate problem at our home. We ended up parked on a corner by a country store where the local “visitor information” resided, after hours of course—no coffee available—trying to call people. In one case, we kept getting a busy signal (weren’t even so lucky as to get dumped into voice mail), and finally gave up and sent email.

Wouldn’t it be nice if voice calls could work more like email (for messaging) – and still let me talk live when that is possible?

-Jim