My mobile phone’s voicemail service has been bugging me for a while: on my Sony Ericsson and now, the Blackberry, if I don’t answer a call within two rings it goes to voicemail. Naturally people only call when I’m in a different room to the mobile.

It turns out that the solution is “extended ringing”, which enables you to specify how long your phone should wait before diverting the call. It’s a code that you type into your phone’s keypad, and in my case (I’m with O2) it’s this:

**61*901*11*XX#

Where XX is the number of seconds the phone should wait, in increments of five – so if you want it to wait 15 seconds XX would be 15 and so on. One you’ve typed it, just hit the call button to update the settings.

No idea if the code works for every phone, and I’d imagine it’s different on different networks. But it’s nice to know such a thing exists.