To your right, you'll recognize a familiar sight - Visual Voicemail. You will notice that I took the liberty to remove (rather sloppily, I might add) sensitive information to protect the names of the innocent (and even not-so-innocent). This is your best friend when you can't answer a call, but when traveling abroad can be a pain in the hind end (more specifically your wallet or purse).

With thanks and due credit to Iljitsch van Beijnum's article at arstechnicha.com (which I recommend you reading), the method of voicemail retrieval is explained. The way voicemail is handled results in excessive international charges.

Essentially, the visual voicemail that ends up on your iPhone makes a criss-cross journey that would make UPS envious. This is how it works:

1. A call placed to you first travels via your country of origin - no matter where a person is in the world when they call you, the call will FIRST go through your home network.
2. The call is then forwarded to the roaming network you are connected to, seeking you out. You now incur international charges ($).
3. If the call is not answered or if you are not available on the network, it will be routed to your voicemail. This is where it gets fun. The call will now RETURN to your home network, incurring more international charges ($$$). Get the idea?

That's it for this week's Tip.  Thanks again to Iljitsch van Beijnum of arstechnicha.com for his article. Check it out! If you have a tip of your own that you would like to share with the rest of us, please leave a Comment or you can email me at: brian.hart@tipb.com.

Disclaimer:  Tip o' the Week makes no guarantee, express or implied, that any tip found herein will be new or particularly useful to the reader (and don't forget to clear your schedule, take a deep breath, and call AT&T Customer Service AGAIN to reactivate your voicemail when you get back). 

As previously mentioned, US Apple Store's have been surprisingly (or suspiciously) out of iPhone stock lately.

Some have speculated that this is due to the immanent release of a 3G iPhone, others have cited atypical supply chain management issues, component shortages, or shipping problems.

In a long post based on info from an anonymous source nom-de-tip'd, Tantrum, Roughly Drafted brings a third option to the table: Pirates. (JAR!)

“Demand for iPhones outside the United States, particularly in emerging markets, is out of control and has reached the point where it has started to impact Apple’s normalized supply chain projections,” Tantrum wrote. “It’s okay to have a delta of, say, 100,000 units or so per year between actual and forecast. International demand is driving that delta upwards of 1 million. That’s a whole different ball game for component sourcing, quality control and production ramp-up and some things are starting to come unstuck, even for a finely managed company like Apple.”

Tantrum mentions 5 specific reasons for the increased international demand:

Ease of jailbreak/unlock with new GUI-based solution. Organizations specializing in getting iPhones into Eastern Europe and Asia. Spread of Wi-Fi and EDGE being "good enough" in most countries. GSM compatibility. Low price (due to weak American dollar and high local smartphone costs).

There's much more in the original post, so be sure to check it out. Could the pirates (JAR!) be sucking the US channels dry? Or is this just another crazy theory in face of the impending 3G monster birthing any minute now? What do you think?