As we fully expected, the comments on our recent post about AT&T's apparent decision to not push out the lastest bugfix version of Windows Phone, 8107, have expressed a good deal of unhappiness. However, one comment in particular caught our eye, from scrapplejoe, which points out a thread at neogaf suggesting Visual Voicemail is present on the Lumia 900. In fact, there's an even deeper backstory involving a method of forced updating and clever data plan switching first discovered at xda-developers, with which it's possible to get Visual Voicemail working on a Nokia Lumia 800, Focus Flash, or even other devices on AT&T. The trick primarily requires two things: enabling a 4G LTE plan on AT&T (whether you have LTE or not on your phone) and ensuring that your phone has — you guessed it — the 8107 build of Windows Phone. Those two things (plus this in-store anecdote relayed at WMPowerUser) all add up to AT&T supporting Visual Voicemail on the Nokia Lumia 900 when it's released next month.

AT&T has not said that it would support Visual Voicemail on Windows Phone, only T-Mobile in the US has signed on for that. The fact that AT&T apparently isn't enabling it for phones that aren't on LTE plans and that don't have the 8107 build — despite the fact that support for Visual Voicemail came as in Windows Phone 7.5 — doesn't bode well for current AT&T Windows Phone users. Back in 2010, AT&T said it would be the "premier carrier" for Windows Phone. Hopefully now, in 2012, that doesn't translate to only providing premier services for the Nokia Lumia 900.

Thanks scrapplejoe!