I pretty much hate voice mail myself. I hate leaving it, since without feedback I tend to ramble which is a little uncomfortable. I've come to prefer text, email, and IM just for the sake of having a written record of communications. For some reason, people only seem to leave voice mail for me when I'm on the go, and the voice mail always contains details that need to be recorded, but obviously since I'm running around I don't record the information right away.

I particularly hate my work voice mail. Of course, I only get voice mail from one person, and it's usually just to let me know that she just emailed me something. The voice mail system used at work is clumsy and non-intuitve. Why do I have to press 11 to listen to the message, rather than 1 like everywhere else? It goes downhill from there. I'm not far from changing the voice mail message at my desk phone to "I'm obviously not at my desk. Please, whatever you do, don't leave a message here. If it's important, just call my BlackBerry. If it's not time sensitive, just send me an email. You can also text me on my iPhone."

Google Voice is promising. It has a voicemail transcription service that goes out by both email and text. I've gotten some hilarious transcriptions from it though. Google Voice also doesn't delete after 14 days, which is good. I also like that visual voicemail on the iPhone also doesn't seem to have a delete time frame.

I'm not sure if I want a Kindle or not. I have Kindle for iPhone, but so far I've only downloaded 2 books, and those were free. I'm not sure I want to commit to buying content for the platform yet.