If you call someone on the Sprint network, you can press 1 to skip the voicemail greeting and get straight to leaving a message. They are even kind enough to tell you this during the extended “instructional” section of the greeting.
The inability to do this with my friends on Cingular has always annoyed me, and since switching to T-Mobile I have the same frustration with the T-Mobile voicemail as well.
After a bit of searching, I found this which claims that the # key is the magic button on these networks (of course, I also found this that claims it isn’t).
So I tried it out1, and here are the results. The magic button for skipping straight to leaving a voicemail message is:
- T-Mobile = #
- Cingular = #
- Sprint = 1
- Verizon2 = 1
Know the “magic button” for another carrier? Add it in the comments.