I've been part of the SpinVox beta trial for the last 10 months, averaging around 10 converted voicemails per day. It is tremendously helpful when sitting in a meeting--you can't answer the call and you don't want to be rude and hold the phone up to your ear to listen to voicemail, but you can steal a quick read of your e-mail without interrupting things. Are the transcriptions perfect? No, but they're 90% accurate and that's good enough. (They have some trouble with names and proper nouns. It's pretty obvious the transcriptionists are not North American. And yes, these are transcripts generated by people, not speech reco software.)

I consider this an essential business app--I can't imagine working without it.

If you don't want to text the info to yourself, you could use Jott instead. With Jott, you speak the note into your phone, which is then converted to text and SMS'd or e-mailed to you (your choice). You can also send messages to other people the same way. Free. I've been using it happily for months now. I don't work for them or own any stock in the company. I'm just a Jott fanboy. http://jott.com/

Oh, please make me a hero. Everybody in my house is expecting to come home with this for Christmas!

In fact, I'm building a new web start-up centered on widgets and live in San Francisco. Can I have two tickets (one for me and one for my co-founder)?

Oooh, oooh, daddy like!

Oooh, Daddy like...

Ooooh, daddy like.

Ooooh, daddy like.

Saw one of these at 3GSM and CTIA. Gotta have it!

I tried the Pearl, returned it, and went to the Samsung SGH-T719. I've never looked back. The 719 is the first clamshell with Blackberry Connect. It's actually a little bit smaller than a RAZR, and does everything the Pearl does: Blackberry e-mail, contacts sync and calendar sync. It's quadband--I've used it in five European countries now. BTW, the keyboard is terrific.