mBox Fax & Voice, from mBox enables you to receive and manage faxes and voicemail on your iPhone or iPod touch via mBox’s online messaging service. It’s an iPhone app and online service combination that is aimed at business people who are frequently out of the office. A salesperson, for example, might use such a service to have faxes forwarded to his iPhone while he or she is out calling on customers.
What’s important here, is not really how much mBox Fax & Voice costs or even how well it performs, but just how functional and useful its online service is to you. That question is easy to answer if you’re already an mBox user. Those services you are already familiar with are now accessible via your iPhone/iPod touch.
mBox Fax & Voice offers a variety of message in, message out and Web mail services for everything from home offices to enterprises.
MessageIn is a virtual fax machine and voice answering service. mBox assigns you a unique telephone number based on your location. When someone sends you a fax or a voicemail, mBox converts the message and sends it to you as an email. The service starts at $8.95 per month.
The MessageOut service allows you to send faxes, emails, voicemail and text messages from any computer connected to the internet. It’s a “pay-as-you-go” service. For example, it costs $0.09 to send a fax and $0.10 per minute to send or receive a voicemail.
mBox also offers a secure email service. Home offices and small to medium-sized businesses receive an address at [email protected], which is accessible by an email application or the Web.
The mBox Fax & Voice app itself is super simple. After launch, you have two options: fax and voicemail. Tap one or the other and see what’s come in. If you’d like, you can delete messaqges. It’s not exactly a one-trick pony, but close. Like I said, what really matters is whether you need such a service and whether you think it’s worth it.