GrandCentral is an awesome idea. GrandCentral doesn’t replace your phones; we just link them together and help them do more. How do we do that? We give people One Number…for LifeTM – a number that’s not tied to a phone or a location – but tied to you. With GrandCentral, you can be reached with a single number, answer a call at any phone you want, seamlessly switch phones in the middle of a call, and even know whether a call is important before you take it.

I’ve been a beta user for a while now and the service is pretty slick. Unfortunately, the number assigned to me got all kinds of random calls so I’ve stopped using it for the short term.

So what does GrandCentral let you do?

  • Check your messages by phone, email, or online
  • Keep all your messages online for eternity
  • Record and store your phone calls (just like voicemail)
  • Quickly (and secretly) block an annoying caller
  • Click-to-dial from your address book
  • Surprise your callers with a custom voicemail greeting
  • Forward, download, and add notes to your messages
Slick stuff and it’s free (currently). But Google bought the company back in 2007 and not much has happened since. In fact, the beta invites dried up and they are not taking new beta users.
It’s not all bad news though… A post at GoogleOperatingSystem notes that “Jeff Huber from Google writes that “a new version on new infrastructure will be coming soon” in a comment of a story about a recent certificate error in GrandCentral.” and “David Pogue adds: “Everyone from GrandCentral still works on GrandCentral, and the 2.0 version is imminent. A PR guy explained to me that it’s taken a year to merge the GrandCentral servers with Google’s, but they’re nearly done.”
We can only hope that Google is indeed working to get GrandCentral integrated with it’s services.

Related posts:

  1. Google Voice “Light” For Any Number
  2. Branded Google Phone – Google set to take over