I know everyone wants a Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich right about now, and all the reviews and recent news is only making the wait harder. I feel your pain don’t worry. We made another quick ICS hands-on demo you can see here, but shortly after we noticed that ICS was lacking any sort of visual voicemail option out of the box. If you remember, Google showed it off in Hong Kong when they unveiled the Galaxy Nexus — but now it’s missing.
Don’t get me wrong, Android has multiple options when it comes to visual voicemail. The carriers currently offer their own like T-Mobile, and we have various options and 3rd party apps from the Android Market — not to mention Google Voice. With Voice we’ve been able to transcribe our voicemails for a long time and this is really nothing new. After watching the impressive visual voicemail presentation from the Hong Kong announcement we were excited to give it a try, but had no such luck.
After reaching out to our contacts we now have an explanation regarding this matter. Visual voicemail as a feature is not currently present out of the box with 4.0 ICS but the option is most certainly included. Instead it is an API so developers and carriers alike can both take advantage of the feature. Basically this means the awesome demo we saw during the event is fully open and available for tweaking by the carriers and 3rd party developers. This is the same approach that the iPhone uses and carriers such as AT&T or Verizon build a visual voicemail provider themselves.
As the Galaxy Nexus and upcoming Android 4.0 ICS devices launch on individual carriers we can expect to see a few different options available. And while the Google Voice visual voicemail seen at the announcement event is currently missing, we can assume that it will be coming soon and we’ll see it updated in the market shortly. Although we have no details regarding that.
While you are here you might as well get your daily Galaxy Nexus fix by watching a few of our videos below. I’ve nicely included the Galaxy Nexus hands-on and unboxing, then the ICS 4.0 overview — Enjoy!
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I am disappointed to see that Google Voice is not letting me use the service as my voicemail. I did it just fine on my OG Droid yet on the Nexus I get a message saying my carrier doesn’t support it.