Google’s GrandCenter: The New Way To Use Your Phone
Earlier this summer, Google acquired GrandCenter Communication, a company that provides services for managing your voice communication. GrandCentral is an innovated service that lets you integrate all of your existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed via the Web of your mobile phone.
A few days ago I signed up to receive what Google calls, “a private invitation” so I figured that there was not chance I was going to get an invitation. Well, to my surprise I received a “private invitation” to join. Registration was incredibly easy - I was up and running within 5 minutes. The process consisted of the following steps:
- Choose a Number - I had the ability to not only select my area code, but I was able to select the city that the number belonged to. This is definitely a nice feature.
- Provide my information - Basically this involved putting in my name, email address, my phone numbers and agreeing to Google’s terms.
- Activate my account - Google calls one of your numbers and you punch in a two digit confirmation code. Once you put in the confirmation code, you record your name and greeting. All done!
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the quality of the service is pretty good, plus all of the features are standard features compared to most VOIP and Analog phone services. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
A few features that I would love to see would be the ability to have an 800 number or the ability to register more local numbers - this way my family, friends and clients could call me on a local number. One other great feature would be to make outgoing calls via a softphone (computer based call) or via an IP Phone. Who knows what the future holds...anything is possible! Well, anyways, I’m excited to try out this new service and see if it lives up to all of its features that Google brags about! Here goes nothing....give GrandCentral a try, its free and easy!