T-Mobile Cellphone Tips

Here are some tips and tricks I have learned using T-Mobile


Using Google Voice as your cellphone voicemail service

A new feature of GV is you can use it to replace your craptastic cellphone voicemail. It really irked me many providers have long stock messages that play, after your custom message, asking if you'd like to leave a callback number... or blah blah blah. Really? This is 2010.

GV has lots of cool features. It doesn't add any voice menu layers for callers unless you ask it to. It will try to transcribe the call to text. You can have it text message the first part of the transcript and callback number to your phone if you like. You can also set it to answer calls sent to voicemail right away, instead of ringing all your GV forwarding numbers. You can see all of your messages and listen to them on your computer, with an app on most smart phones, or by calling in. The phone attendant speaks much faster with a more sensible menu layout, than most network voicemail attendants, which I LOVE!

To set it up, get a GV account, go to your phone numbers, and under your cellphone select to use GV for voicemail. It will give you a code to enter on your cellphone, which is the short code to enable busy/no answer/unavailable call forwarding. It should be like this for T-Mobile -

* 004 * 1 (10 digit phone number) * 11 # (send)

Now try calling your cellphone and not answering it. You should get your new GV account. Source

Changing the number of seconds until voicemail picks up, or no answer forwarding kicks in

According to T-Mobile support, if you'd like to change the number of seconds of ringing before voicemail picks up, dial in the following code, then press send. If it accepts it, you should hear a series of rapid beeps, and then you can hang up. You can choose between 5 and 30 seconds in 5 second intervals.

** 61 * 1 (10 digit phone number) ** (seconds) # (send)

When I was told this by TMO, they gave me a list of phones it applies to, and said it might apply to other phones. I tried it on both @home and my Blackberry Pearl. On @home, it didn't seem to work, and on the Pearl, it would respond "Supplementary Service Error-Unexpected Value". So this may or may not work with regular more basic GSM phones. Or TMO may just have BS in their knowledge base for their phone reps.

It was explained to me here that this should be a phone independent (network switch feature), so it should work with any phone. And that it also doesn't appear to be the code to change the ringing length, but the code to change forwarding options, according to GSM standards. In practice, it seems TMO isn't using this code for forwarding or anything else.