The free Pinger service solves a whole host of problems and inconveniences you encounter with both text and voice messaging on cell phones. If you use your cell phone for work, or have a busy social or family life, the benefits of Pinger are immediately obvious. Basically, Pinger sends your voice messages via text, allowing you to leave messages for people without calling their cell phones, and to send messages to groups of people with a single call.

Sometimes referred to as "audio text messaging," Pinger is fast and simple to set up (it took me about 2 minutes to register and input my first few names), and works like this: You call the Pinger phone number, hear "Who do you wanna message?", say the name of the person, then record your message. The recipient gets a text message that prompts them to dial the Pinger local number (which they can do by pressing their call button, no need to manually dial) to retreive your message. Because you don't encounter layers of prompts or inputting of passwords, it's painless to shoot off messages like this all day long, and equally painless to receive them.

It's a handy tool when: