MobileSphere, a global wireless communications solutions provider, has released Monday its latest service that grants users access to a person's voicemail without initiating a phone call first. This service seems ideal for people who feel that a text message is too impersonal to be sent to someone, but there is no time, or no disposition to engage in a full phone conversation.

The best thing about the new service, dubbed Slydial, is that it is free, and can be easily accessed by dialing  267-SLYDIAL from any phone. And if people are asking themselves how is the company making any money out of Slydial, well, there is only one word for it: advertising.

Before getting access to the voicemail of the person you want to leave a message to, the service plays an ad. Of course, people who don't want to be bugged by this can always skip the ads, but at a cost. There are two ways that someone can skip the ads. One of them is paying a subscription fee, the other one is giving the company 15 cents for every ad a person skips.

The new service offers some really interesting benefits for people who use it for business purposes. It allows someone that has little time to spend on the phone to alert or remind other people about an event or a payment that has become overdue, while still skipping the time-consuming smalltalk that might occur.

The Slydial version that was released Monday is a beta testing one and the service still experiences some problems. For instance, in some cases, the phone of the person whose voicemail had to be reached rang briefly. In some cases, this might make people call back, and the whole idea of skipping the conversation would be compromised. However, it is still hope that MobileSphere will solve this problems in the future.