While even the most basic phones come with a phone number and the ability to send text messages, an increasing number of people are choosing alternatives such as Google Voice and Pinger.

Some do so to avoid a phone and contract entirely, pairing those services with an iPod touch or other device. Others use the alternative services to add a second line to their cellphone or to avoid pricey text message charges.

On Wednesday, Pinger said it is beefing up its iOS service with the addition of voicemail.

As with all Pinger apps, it’s free and ad-supported. Existing users who want to use voicemail will be asked to ditch their old Pinger app and download a new one.

Pinger, which has 15 million users overall, is most popular on iPod touches. But interestingly, 30 percent of Pinger users are on smartphones, according to Pinger co-founder Joe Sipher.

The market for services that replace the traditional ones provided by the carrier is growing, with apps like WhatsApp and Touch quietly becoming some of the most popular downloads in the market.

Voicemail itself has been seen as a potential beachhead for so-called “over-the-top” services. French carrier Orange released an iOS app that replaces the iPhone’s built-in voicemail app with one that allows users to record separate messages depending on who is calling.

AllThingsD’s Ina Fried contributed to this report.

Enflick, which makes the popular PingChat, is today renaming its app as the more all-embracing and generic “Touch,” and is reshaping it around communication within small private groups.

(Enflick CEO Derek Ting said he was able to buy Touch.com for the relatively low price of $100,000 from another Canadian who happened to own it. Bet a lot of people would have liked to have known it was on the market, eh?)

Touch helps dynamic groups of close friends chat and share photos. While that functionality is pretty basic, Touch is designed as a very live app — beyond push notifications, it shows when a user is typing, when a message is delivered and when it’s read.

What’s most notable about Touch among all the emerging mobile social competition is that it already has millions of users. For many promising apps, navigating app stores and pockets of smartphone usage to get to critical mass is a huge challenge. Social apps just aren’t as fun or useful without friends, and definitely not without other people.

Still, changing up a product users already know and love often makes those users angry. And there are many texting app alternatives, like Kik, WhatsApp and Pinger.

Touch is available for iOS, Android and BlackBerry at launch, with HTML5 coming. Also on the way are video and voice support, Ting said.

Enflick was bootstrapped for the past two years, and has a relatively large team of 32 in Waterloo, Ontario. It has now raised $1 million from investors including Freestyle Capital and Menlo Ventures.

That said, the small San Jose-based start-up has managed to rack up some pretty impressive numbers. The team, led by several ex-Palm and Handspring workers, is announcing on Thursday that its TextFree app is now serving up more than a billion text messages per month and its voice app, released in December, is already connecting more than one million minutes of voice calls a day.

Users get a handful of calling minutes free and can then either pay for more or earn them by downloading apps or performing other actions.

“We’re making calling and texting free, which really no one has done on a sustainable level,” said Joe Sipher, Pinger’s “chief product and marketing guy” and a former top executive at Handspring. The company brought in $1.5 million in revenue in December and was profitable for the year.

And by selling advertising space to companies pitching their apps, Pinger is yet another company aiming to build a business around helping mobile application companies break through the discovery challenge–a business model being tapped these days by lots of companies from start-ups like Mobilewalla to established companies, such as Opera.

Sipher said that a lot of the voice minutes–on the order of 80 percent–are coming via devices that don’t have a built-in ability to make voice calls, such as the iPad and recent versions of the iPod Touch. Still others come from iPhone owners who don’t want to use up their alotted minutes or pay for a bigger plan.

“It’s a lot of iPod Touches, a few iPads and quite a few iPhones,” Sipher said. The company also has a version for Android.

Sipher and partner in crime Greg Woock started Pinger several years ago with a completely different idea. Initially, Pinger was a product for exchanging voice messages, similar in concept to the Thoughts app that Jawbone launched last year. However, after burning through three-fourths of the cash they had raised, Woock and Sipher realized that there was no way to get the idea to both scale and profitability.

But, when the iPhone came along, Sipher said the pair saw a different opportunity come their way.

While the core audience is young people–including many high school students–TextFree has found a lot of interesting niches. Sipher said the app is popular with those in the U.S. military because they get an American phone number and can send free texts to loved ones from
Germany or Afghanistan or wherever. “We’re making a lot of people really happy that way too,” Sipher said.

It is not the first pairing for Sipher and Woock. The two were also the leadership team for the short-lived attempt by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group to create a line of MP3 players and other electronics.

“This Saturday the iPad arrives and we believe it’s going to rule the world,” said KPCB partner John Doerr. “I’ve touched it, I’ve carressed it and I hope to sleep with it this Saturday night. It feels gorgeous. It isn’t a big iPhone, but it is a big deal. It’s the future….We’re heading into a brave new world. From our old interfaces to touch. From WYSIWYG–what you see is what you get–to WYTIWIS ‘what you touch is what is.’”

A number of apps built by iFund companies will be available when the iPad launches this Saturday, among them seven games from ngmoco, as well as Doodle Buddy and Star Smash from Pinger, textPlus from GOGII and Shazam from Shazam Entertainment. Not announced today but headed to market soon: iPad apps from Zynga, Shopkick and Cooliris.

KPCB’s Bing Gordon closed the presentation segment of today’s event by reading a poem. Sadly, I missed most of it because of connection issues, but it began with this salute to the iPhone: “Welcome to the world; My new friend and pocket master.”

Tech Trader Daily and TechCrunch, which attended the event in person, have more detailed notes here and here.

Below, a few screenshots from the WebEx presentation, and the official announcement:

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Doubles iFund to $200 Million

iFund Companies to Deliver More Than a Dozen New iPad Applications by May

MENLO PARK, Calif., March 31, 2010 – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced the doubling of its iFund to $200 million of venture capital for applications for Apple’s revolutionary iPhone OS family of products, including iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Established in 2008 as a $100 million investment pool, the original iFund is now fully committed across 14 companies. iFund companies have been supported by an additional $330 million from follow-on investors.

KPCB also announced iFund-supported companies have more than 20 applications in development for the soon-to-be-released iPad, with 11 available at first ship on April 3. KPCB noted the iPhone has created an inflection in mobile content consumption and the iPad will lead the next wave of innovation in mobile computing. The iFund is increasing its investment dollars to back entrepreneurs and build companies that focus on these areas. Particular areas of interest on iPad include entertainment, communication, social networking, commerce, health care, and education.

“Welcome to the brave new post-PC era where a swoosh of fluidity replaces the traditional mouse-bound GUI. A new, truly revolutionary platform is rare, and a prize for entrepreneurs,” said John Doerr, KPCB Partner. “We expect all ventures to have an iPad strategy. We will fund many more ventures for iPad, and the iFund will accelerate their success.”

“Kleiner Perkins has done a terrific job at finding, funding and supporting great iPhone app developers,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We are thrilled that they are doubling the size of their fund, along with expanding it to now include iPad developers too.”

Matt Murphy, Partner at KPCB and leader of the iFund, reported that KPCB’s iFund ventures have achieved significant success, including:

More than $100 million of 2010 mobile revenue
More than 100 million aggregate mobile downloads
An amazing 18 titles reached the Top 10 on the App Store

“We’re ecstatic to be doubling down on the iFund after two short years,” said Murphy. “The success of the App Store and its impact on consumers has been 10 times faster and bigger than we expected. Kleiner Perkins and iFund companies have enjoyed an incredibly helpful and unwavering partner in Apple.”

Recent milestones for iFund companies include:

GOGII’s 5.5 million users have sent 2 billion messages through textPlus
ngmoco’s titles are installed on over one-third of iPhone OS devices and played 20 million minutes each day
Pinger launched 10 apps into the App Store Top 100 in a single month
Shazam’s 50 million worldwide users are tagging over 2 million songs per day
Booyah’s MyTown has over 1.6 million users doing 4 million location check-ins per day

The 11 applications available this week from iFund companies include seven games from ngmoco including We Rule, GodFinger and WarpGate, as well as Doodle Buddy and Star Smash from Pinger, textPlus from GOGII, and Shazam from Shazam Entertainment.

But voice mail lags behind in key ways. A voice mail still doesn’t tell you the caller’s name or reason for calling unless you listen to at least part of it. You usually can’t reply to a voice mail with a message of your own, as with email; instead, you must call the person back. And you can’t easily jump from the most recent voice mail to the 10th without listening to every message in between.

Pinger, a free voice mail messaging service, works on mobile devices, email and its Web site, www.pinger.com.

Still, voice mail has its place. A phone call is much more personal than an email, and lets you use vocal inflection to express your point, whereas email expressions can sometimes be misinterpreted. And it’s often easier and faster to speak your message than to type it out.

This week, I tested Pinger, a free messaging service that tries to make voice mail more usable by emphasizing its strengths and making it a little more like email, or like a cellphone text message. This new service comes from Pinger Inc, a Silicon Valley-based company started by former Palm Inc. employees.

Pinger works by sending messages using a quick back-and-forth voice-mail system. You dial a special number, say the recipient’s name, leave a message and hang up. The recipient is notified of this message and its sender via Short Message Service (SMS), and/or email and then must dial in or go to a Web page to hear the voice mail. He or she can reply to the voice mail by pressing “1,” leaving a message for the sender and hanging up.

You can also log into your Pinger account via the www.pinger.com Web site. Here, your Pinger voice mails are listed like emails, including the sender’s name, time sent, length and notes that you can add about each message. A green arrow beside messages indicates that you replied, and messages can be sorted by category.

Pinger is one of several new services that are trying to bring voice into the Internet age. One, called Jott, at jott.com, lets you dial a number and dictate messages to yourself, like notes or reminders, or messages that can be broadcast to others. It even tries to transcribe what you say. Another, called Evoca, at evoca.com, records and stores dictation for archiving, sharing and podcasting. It offers both transcription and translation.

Overall, Pinger’s messaging service was most convenient when I was the sender rather than the receiver. When I didn’t have time to type a message on my BlackBerry or didn’t want to bother with writing a text message on my phone’s numeric keypad, Pinger proved to be a fast, hassle-free process that took only a few tries to get down pat. And it was helpful in situations when I wanted to leave a message rather than talk to another person.

But the process of receiving a Pinger message on a mobile device isn’t as straightforward as it should be. In the time needed to receive and read the Pinger text message notification about a voice mail, some users could have already received and read a text message or BlackBerry email.

I got started with Pinger by setting up an account with my first and last name, email address and a four-digit PIN. I entered my cellphone number, as well as the make and model of my cellphone.

Then, I went to the Web site Pinger.com to set up a list of contacts by entering names and email addresses of friends. I manually entered a few contacts, and then followed steps to import a more complete list of my contacts from Microsoft’s Outlook Express. Contacts can also be imported from Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Entourage and Outlook.

You can send and receive messages directly on the Pinger site, without a phone, but you need a computer with a microphone to record messages.

But Pinger is at its best when used as an on-the-go solution with your cellphone or mobile device; I quickly left messages for friends in just a few steps. After calling a special number, a recorded voice asked, “Who do you wanna message?” I spoke the name of one of my contacts, the system repeated it back to me and a tone sounded after which I left my voice mail. Hanging up automatically sends the message.

To respond to a Pinger message on your cellphone, you press your phone’s “1″ button after listening to the original message and speak after the tone. Just like with email, you can forward a voice mail or reply to all recipients of the message.

But until I became familiar with Pinger, I wasn’t sure which numeric commands did what. Pinger gives as few vocal prompts as possible to simplify things. For example, if five messages are sent back and forth between two people, the entire thread of messages will play back on the voice mail before any vocal prompts are heard. This can be a little confusing, unless you remember that the “0″ key always opens a help menu.

Pinger may have trouble finding an audience. The idea of using voice mail might be considered too old-fashioned for younger users, while the thought of receiving a text message to get a voice mail might be too complicated for older users. And, though Pinger is currently free, it may charge in the future.

For people who are already familiar with mobile messaging, the extra step of calling in or logging on to a Web site to get a message may seem redundant. Pinger hopes its service will appeal to those who don’t currently use text messaging or email on a mobile device, but still want a fast way to send messages.

If you prefer the personal touch of voice mail over email and text messaging, or you don’t always have time to call someone else for fear of starting an entire conversation, Pinger works well. It takes a little practice to get comfortable with how you’ll use it in your everyday life, but it offers a new way to look at messaging.

Email address: MossbergSolution@wsj.com