Ever since text messaging became a popular thing, I’ve loathed the standard voicemail set-up more and more each day. It’s just so incredibly broken and dated – all of the annoyances of any automated phone system, with the added treat of messages that tend to be 5 minutes longer than they need to be.

Visual Voicemail on the iPhone was a huge step in the right direction, but it didn’t do any good for those of us on other handsets. Fortunately, that’s all changing. Taking the idea and bumping it up to the next level, YouMail has introduced a browser based visual voicemail system for BlackBerries, Windows Mobile devices, Palm devices, and S60 devices. After creating an account, users can listen to and manage voicemails similar to the way they’re used to with text messages and email.

Like the rest of Youmail’s offerings, the new service is free. It will also transcribe voicemails to text or e-mail. This could be a bit of a hit to PhoneTag‘s (previously SimulScribe) gameplan, as they currently charge about 10 bucks a month for 40 voicemail-to-text transcriptions.

For more, check out Youmail.

[Via Phonescoop]