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Dashwire's new goodies make the most of your phone

Dashwire adds CallWave visual voicemail and other impressive features for managing your phone online better than before.

Jessica Dolcourt Senior Director, Commerce & Content Operations
Jessica Dolcourt is a passionate content strategist and veteran leader of CNET coverage. As Senior Director of Commerce & Content Operations, she leads a number of teams, including Commerce, How-To and Performance Optimization. Her CNET career began in 2006, testing desktop and mobile software for Download.com and CNET, including the first iPhone and Android apps and operating systems. She continued to review, report on and write a wide range of commentary and analysis on all things phones, with an emphasis on iPhone and Samsung. Jessica was one of the first people in the world to test, review and report on foldable phones and 5G wireless speeds. Jessica began leading CNET's How-To section for tips and FAQs in 2019, guiding coverage of topics ranging from personal finance to phones and home. She holds an MA with Distinction from the University of Warwick (UK).
Expertise Content strategy, team leadership, audience engagement, iPhone, Samsung, Android, iOS, tips and FAQs.
Jessica Dolcourt
2 min read
Dashwire

Dashwire, a small Seattle start-up eleven employees strong, continues to impress with its growing service for managing and interacting with the contents of your cell phone online. To recap an earlier review, Dashwire synchronizes your cell phone to an online account, displaying on a flexible dashboard your call history, images, profile, texting history, photos, ring tones, videos, and contacts. You can roll up your sleeves and muck around with your phone from Dashwire, a much happier experience than crouching over your two-inch cell phone screen and tapping or clicking away through on-device management programs, particularly if you're not on the go and are sitting comfortably in front of a computer, thank you very much.

Since Dashwire is linked to your phone via a downloadable client, everything you do online also occurs on your phone, and vice versa. Therefore, you can view, tag, and share media, send text messages, listen to voice mail, and add bookmarks from the comfort of your online dashboard. It's cool. But in the last month, it's gotten cooler.

Dashwire's flexible dashboard includes CallWave visual voice mail
Dashwire

There have been quiet roll-outs of tweaks, even a few big changes. For a start, Dashwire has drastically improved its search tool. Users can now push photos to friends' phones, e-mail addresses, and Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Bebo. (In Twitter, most photos are converted to a TinyURL.com link. It doesn't work 100 percent of the time, and Dashwire's working on that.)

The service also now supports data transferring when users switch phones, which was the top request among private beta testers, and a great new feature for quickly assigning speed dial settings.

The big thing, though, is integration with CallWave, a service that transcribes voice messages to text. This is a smart move, and it makes perfect sense for Dashwire, which is all visual management, to provide visual voice mail.

Coming up
Dashwire will be introducing a few more additions in stages over the next six months. Starting Friday, text messages will be threaded by contact, in a manner much like the iPhone. In about four to six weeks, a new, dynamic phone client will replace the current app, which is currently limited to a few syncing options. The new, richer Dashwire client will peform all sorts of party tricks, like pulling in media when you switch to a new handset, push status updates to Facebook and Twitter, and pull in content from the Web.

The final announcement in this cascade of upgrades is that Symbian S60 users will be able to get their hands on Dashwire if they can hold their horses until late August or early September.

Dashwire runs equally well from your phone memory and storage card, and it's now in public beta for Windows Mobile users. Get out there and try it.

>>See all the latest news in cell phones and mobile software coming out of CTIA Wireless 2008.

Dashwire lets you post images online or share with friends.
Share photos via SMS, e-mail, or post online. CNET Networks