Anybody tried this service yet? The company was bought by Google early July and now they are in Beta. They just announced numbers in my area today. One of the best features so far is being able to transfer a call from work desk phone to my cell with 1 button.
from the website:
GrandCentral offers many features that complement the phone services you already use. If you have multiple phone numbers (e.g., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones, based on who’s calling. This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job. The service also gives you one central voice mailbox. You can listen to your voicemails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more. You can even listen in on voicemail messages from your phone while they are being recorded, or switch a call from your cell phone to your desk phone and back again. All in all, you’ll have a lot more control over your phones.
David Pogue from the NYTimes wrote a review and raved about it.
Sign up NOW if it’s still free.
It was available nationwide before Google bought them, but I didn’t sign up. Then google bought them and they went to a “referral” model (kinda like when Gmail first came out and you needed an invite). Now I can’t get in.
It’s pretty cool, many companies utilize this from commercial providers. I have seen some features that GC has that companies I’m familiar with didn’t offer.
I think they have a few good demo videos on their site.
They don’t serve all areas, so if they don’t serve yours you should sign up for a # now and wait for them to come to town.
The one drawback for me is that I would want to use my current cell phone number as my GC number, not some new/random number they give me. If I can port my # between cell phone providers (or land line for that matter) then I’d like to port my current number to this.
Not sure if they’ll ever start charging for this, Google never charged for non-corporate use of Gmail which was an invitation only service at first. This would be great for a new small business.
I’ve used it for about 6 months…works as described, will most likely get some new features now that Google has it…sign-up b-4 they start charging for it.