Announcing back in September 2012 that it would enable the feature on customer iPhones, EE said today that it has enabled Visual Voicemail for customers on its 4GEE plans, becoming only the second UK carrier to offer the service (behind O2) since the iPhone launched in 2007.
Visual Voicemail, if you aren’t aware, is a service that allows iPhone owners to see the names and numbers of people who have left messages on their voicemail inboxes directly on their smartphone, instead of requiring them to call a dedicated number and select from automated prompts.
EE says that new iPhone 5 customers on its 4GEE plans will able to get Visual Voicemail activated in-store or online, while existing customers can text “iPhone visual” to 150 and have it activated within 24 hours. If you turn it on and you don’t like it, you can text “iPhone visual off” to the same number and you’ll get a confirmation text saying it’s been switched off.
According to a thread on the EE Community forums, the carrier has slowly been rolling it out over the past week and the service is also available to Orange customers on a £36 (or higher) tariff, via the same process. As for T-Mobile customers, the same user suggests EE has to migrate T-Mobile users to the same voicemail systems used by Orange, which may require a little more waiting.
The operator says that any data used in the UK to download visual voicemail messages will be free of charge.
EE says that to be eligible for the service, your iPhone must be running iOS 6 or higher, and have the most up to date EE carrier settings which are 13.2.
We tested it on an iPhone 5 not connected to a 4G network and were unable to access the feature, at least at the time of writing.
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