Village Gamer

Vancouver’s Karta Mobile Inc. has announced the immediate availability of a new BlackBerry app that lets BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) friends exchange visual voicemail messages with each other for free. Designed for times when people want to say something that is too long to type or is just not practical to type out in full, for example when walking or in a hurry, VVM Messenger makes exchanging visual voicemail messages (VVMs) easy and fun.

Version 1.0 of VVM Messenger comes with a stylish touch screen interface that makes recording and sending visual voicemails over BBM as easy as two taps on the screen away. Toggling between handset and speakerphone is also supported and senders can replay and re-record a message before sending it to make sure it sounds just the way they want it to. Messages can be up to 25 seconds in length.

In addition to being free, VVM Messenger can also save people money. VVM Messenger encodes voicemail messages as data and people with unlimited BlackBerry data or BlackBerry social plans can save on their regular voice, daytime and long distance minutes when sending a short voice message to a BBM contact.

VVM Messenger can also save travellers on their roaming charges, which can be substantial even on trips of short duration. Encoded as data, VVMs typically incur much lower charges than regular roaming voice messages as they are billed by the kilobyte unlike regular roaming voice calls which are typically charged at much higher rates.

VVM Messenger is available as “VVM – Voicemail for BBM” from App World and is supported on BlackBerry OS 5.0 or later, thus covering more than 98% of the BlackBerry install base. It is a BBM social application and requires an SD card and BlackBerry Messenger 6.0.1 or later. The first time it runs the application prompts users to download the required version of BlackBerry messenger if an old version is found present.