I have spoken to a number of people that do and do not have voice dial phones with and without AT&T service, most of them engineers like myself (so most of them are not afraid of features like voice dial, bluetooth, smart phones, etc). So no, I am not going crazy. It does not appear that AT&T gets special phones with the voicedial capability disabled. They just don't mention in the descriptions of most of the phones that do have it, I guess hoping neophytes will sign up for a $5 per month service which makes the feature less convenient, and if you have a bluetooth in your car, less safe since you could not use the one touch dialing that most bluetooths use.

In the answer to the response to my first post - a phone's voice dial and/or voice command capabilty has nothing to do with the phone service. You say a name (or a number), the phone recognizes it, and dials the number.

Below are lists of phones that AT&T currently carries that do and do not have voice dial and/or voice command capabiliies. Amazingly, these details are not often provided in AT&T's description of the phone and I had to google <phone name> "voice dial" and find out from various websites. THIS DATA MAY OR MAY NOT BE ACCURATE since it may only be based on one or two reviews or descriptions of the phones from various websites - research the phones more carefully if you have an interest in this. It was usually easy to find if a phone did not have voice dialing capability since the first few google hits would often be people commenting along the lines that "I am surprised a phone that costs this much does not have voice dialing?" or "this would be a good phone if it had voice dialing."

The following does not distinguish between the capability of having to preprogram voice tags as opposed to automatic detection based on the name in the address book. For example, the Motorola v365 and older RAZRs you have to record a voice tag for each entry you want to able to voice dial while the newer RAZRs appear to full voice commands, being able to recognize names in the address books (as well as digits) without prerecording them into the phone.  Palm or Blackjack phones are not reported here since with my cursory inspection of the capabilities of the phones I could not tell whether you had to purchase an app or not for voicedial to work on their phones, or for bluetooth to work properly with voicedial or voice commands. I don't think there is official iPhone voice dialing but someone I know who has one says there is a hack for it.

So, given the long list of phones below in all price ranges that do have voice dial capability, why would anyone choose one that did not and instead pay an extra $5 per month for this service? Especially considering the $5 service is more of a hassle since you need to press two buttons instead of one to activate it, and it does not work with simple bluetooth devices? I guess I am still baffled.


Voice dial and/or voice command phones

Nokia 6555
Tilt
Blackberry Pearl
Blackberry 8310
Motorola V365
Samsung A737
Ericsson W580i
Ericsson z310a
Blackberry 8800
RAZR V3
Nokia 6126
Nokia 6085
LG CU405
Pantech C3b
Pantech Duo
Motorola V190
Nokia N75
Moto Q
Blackberry 8820


Phones without voice dial or voice commands

LG CU515
Samsung A437
Samsung A517
Samsung A727
Blackberry 8700c
Pantech C150
LG Shine
Samsung SLM