While You Were Out: Phone Messaging on Your Mac

You are a modern day marvel. You email while walking down the street. You carry your entire music collection in the palm of your hand. Perhaps you can even turn on the inside house lights from your car and serve dinner to your cat via a time release food bowl. But yet, you still keep that pink “While You Were Out” message pad by old faithful – your landline – to take notes or leave messages from your incoming phone calls. Well, maybe it’s time to add a little Mac cache to the old home or business phone with the help of Phlink 3.0.

Announced just yesterday, Ovolab’s Phlink 3.0 is meant to make your phone calls more accessible and manageable. At first blush, when used in connection with your Apple’s Address Book, the Phlink is a nifty way to screen your call (pop up caller ID) and log all your incoming and outgoing calls on your Mac.

But, beyond that, there are other cool features promised, meant to make your life just a little easier, if not simpler.

Record Special Announcements  for specified incoming numbers. Just be sure you don’t accidentally declare your love to the bill collector and tell your spouse to never call you again – unless, of course, you mean it.

Listen to your voice mail anywhere you can check your email. Have the capability to forward all your voice messages to your email account as attachments.

Record all your conversations using the Call Snoopfeature. Get accurate quotes from phone interviews (a personal favorite), keep a database of business transactions, and have the ability to prove to your friend later on that he did indeed say to meet up at 8, not 9, as he later claimed.

Share and share alike with multiple voice mail boxes. Set up separate accounts for family lines, roommate privacy or for office use.

Just the fax. Phlink will integrate with pagesend for receiving faxs on your Mac.

Got Eye TV? If you are an Elegato Eye TV digital recorder user, and you forget to set your Eye TV to record your favorite show, the Phlink will allow you to set it remotely via the phone.

The Hardware involved with Phlink 3.0 is a small USB device which allows the software to interface with your phone line.  ISDN phones (using a terminal adapter), as well as VOIP services like Vonage are all compatible with both hardware and software.

Pricing for the hardware/software package is 149.95 plus shipping. The unit is shipping now.  For a free download of the software only, visit http://ovolab.com/phlink.

The only reported drawbacks currently being disclosed by the company is an inability to recognize call waiting caller ID and incompatibility currently with Japanese caller ID.

Ease of use is still pending by this author. Apple Matters will get its hands on it soon and be sure to report back. So, be careful if you call. That beeping noise you hear just might mean you are being recorded.