The popular voice-to-text service, Jott, which heretofore was completely free, announced that they are now “out of beta”, and they have introduced a tiered services pricing plan.  In other words, most users will now have to pay monthly fees to get Jott’s most desirable features.  (See our earlier review of Jott, posted here, for a full description of the handy transcription service.)

Users can still use Jott for free, but only in a very limited form, and only if they are willing to see advertisements on their Jott.com page.  The “Jott Basic” option allows unlimited voice-to-text note and reminder recordings of up to 15 seconds each.  However, Jott Basic will not support management of notes and lists via email - users will have to go to the Jott.com site to access their lists and notes directly, and they will see ads displayed there. Further, Jott Basic does not support sending emails or text messages to other people - users must upgrade to higher-tier services for this popular feature.

According to Doug Aley, Jott Networks’ VP of Marketing and Business Development, “While we may serve ads in Jott Feeds (the service that reads RSS feeds back to you) eventually on the phone, we will likely not mess with the voice user interface, even on the free service. We plan to serve ads on our web site.”

Also, Jott Basic will support only a limited number of external links to other web services, which are:

• Micro-blog messaging platforms: Twitter, Jaiku and Tumblr
• Blogging content management systems: Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress
• Third-party information sources: Amazon.com and Zillow

The regular Jott service tier is now US$3.95 per month, and includes:

• No advertising
• Unlimited 15-second messages (just like Jott Basic)
• Management of notes and lists either online at Jott.com or through e-mail
• The ability to send e-mail or text messages through Jott to other people
• Links to many more web services for calendar management, task management, and additional web-enabled information sources
• Automated voice-to-text transcription of tasks and appointments into Microsoft Outlook

The highest tier of service, Jott Pro, costs US$12.95 per month and includes all the features of the regular Jott service tier, plus:

• 30-second messages (instead of 15 seconds)
• The ability to reply to email on a BlackBerry device using Jott voice recordings

All tiers have access to Jott Feeds - which will read blog feeds to you over the phone - and they all also include Jott Express - an Adobe AIR-based desktop application that provides client-side management of Jott messages and reminders, and Jott for iPhone - a similar application for the Apple iPhone.  Users may cancel or change their Jott plans at any time without penalty.

What does this mean to sales professionals?

As we said in our earlier review, Jott is a very handy utility for salespeople on the go.  The ability to leave reminders and to-do items with a quick phone call, and then receive those messages in text form, almost immediately, is great for sales pros that need to keep track of myriad details without touching a keyboard.  Further, the ability to send emails or instant text messages to other users by leaving a quick voice recording on Jott is a godsend to mobile sales pros.

When the service was free, Jott was a no-brainer addition to any busy salesperson’s toolkit.  We think the free Jott Basic tier is now almost worthless - in other words, you get what you pay for.  However, getting all the functionality of the previously freebie Jott service for less than four bucks a month ain’t bad - in fact, we still think it’s a great bargain, and we still recommend it.

We only wish we didn’t have to pay more than three times the standard service fee, just to get BlackBerry integration.  That seems too big a step in Jott’s tiered pricing plan to recommend it, especially since BlackBerry users (and we are one of those) can get virtually all the voice-to-text functionality they need from the regular Jott service anyway.

We previously awarded the free Jott service a Sales Pro Value Score of 4.5 out of a possible 5.  With their recent change to a “for fee” service, and considering the enhancements they’ve made to Jott functionality, we’re downgrading that rating, but only slightly - to a 4 out of 5.

UPDATE: TechCrunch reports Jott has over 420,000 customers

Tags: Jott, Jott Basic, Jott Express, Jott Pro

If you are tied to the Sprint mobile network in the US, either by contract or by some weirdly unexplainable emotional bond, and you have iPhone envy bad, then you owe it to yourself to look at Samsung’s new Instinct, released this week at a bargain price of US$129.99 with a 2-year contract and a US$100 mail-in rebate - or get some professional counseling, although that’s probably more expensive. (Just think of the phone as a form of therapy, and save some money.)

Though it’s not quite the “iPhone killer” it was originally touted to be, the Instinct is a darned nice unit, with some useful features for sales pros, including:

• Touch-screen interface — although it’s not multi-touch like the Apple iPhone, and therefore, less cool, it definitely is easy to operate — just point and touch the screen
• Real-time GPS navigation and routing - Unlike the iPhone 3G, the Instinct includes spoken and graphical real-time, turn-by-turn driving directions, and location searches direct from the handset
• Tons of e-mail connectivity options - synchronize mail delivery to your handset from AOL, Yahoo!, Gmail, MSN/Windows Live Hotmail, Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes Domino
• SMS Text Messaging - an absolute requirement for sales teams
• Web browsing - although it’s theoretically not as fast as the new iPhone 3G, it’s definitely faster than the old AT&T EDGE network, which makes the Instinct fast enough for most web search tasks
• 2.0 megapixel camera and video camcorder - ever need to record that flip-chart or whiteboard after a sales meeting? Just snap a picture or a quick video with this high resolution camera. (Also, the iPhone doesn’t record video - I’m just sayin’…)
• Speakerphone - but you probably won’t use it much, because it is…
• Bluetooth® enabled - Including Stereo BT profile, another feature also not available on the iPhone
• Bluetooth spoken caller ID - When connected to a Bluetooth device, caller information for incoming calls is spoken through the Bluetooth device, so you don’t have to look at the handset display
• MicroSD Memory - a 2 gigabyte card is included, and can be upgraded to 8GB

Tags: reasons for salespeople to look at the Samsung Instinct, Samsung Instinct for Sprint