Fonolo for iPhone: Sluggish But Useful

Have you ever called a ___fill_in_the_blank_with_name_of_any_big_company___ and been greeted with an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) gives you hundreds of options but no apparent way to speak with a human being? Fonolo is a free service that helps you cut your way through a the large and confusing phone trees that businesses often throw in from of their IVR systems. And, they now provide a free iPhone app to help you cut through IVR forests…

Fonolo 1.1 (iTunes App Store)

Be forewarned, however, that the app appeared very slugging during my tests (I was connected to the net over WiFi, not 3G). And, you have to create an account before you can use the service (no fee involved). The app seemed to work as expected during my tests. My only real disappointment is that it didn’t have any information for contacting Acer (I have a couple of Aspire One netbook problems I’d like to talk to them about).

There are only 13 customer reviews of the Fonolo app in the iTunes App Store as I write this. And, the average review is only 2 stars (out of a possible 5). There aren’t any published comments. So, we can’t read why the 9 outof 13 reviewers gave it a 1 or 2 star rating.

My suspicion is that your evaluation of the Fonolo for iPhone app will be directly related to the amount of time you spent trying to get through a company’s phone tree before trying Fonolo.

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