Took the GrandCentral Plunge

As I’ve started to review more, and more phones (we have four phones up for review in the next week alone), getting ahold of me has been difficult. Sure, I can call forward, but what if I forget? Or the battery runs out? And don’t get me started on voicemail…

So, I finally signed up for GrandCentral. As we’ve covered previously, GrandCentral gives you “one number, for life”. It call forwards your calls to all the phones you have, so you can take the call on the phone that’s best for you.

But, the fun doesn’t end there. You have Visual Voicemail with MP3 downloads (which you can even access on your phone with the WAP browser), it has call recording and screening, free ringback tones (which you can screen by profile).

It even imports all mainstream contact databases on-the-fly. Which is great for screening calls and deploying ringback tones by caller or category.

One of my favorite features is the ability to transfer a call to another phone… while in the middle of the call. You can press * at any time, and all your other phones ring. Pick up another phone, and continue the call there.

However, there is some room for improvement. Here are some things I’d like to see:

� Carrier voicemail integration. Send a copy of voicemails to my phone’s inbox, so that I can access them using my carrier’s interface. This enables proper voicemail notification (sans unreliable text messages), as well as things like iPhone Visual Voicemail.

� Smartphone application versions. Waiting for a WAP page is lame. Make GrandCentral clients for Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and S60. This would allow people to have iPhone-quality Visual Voicemail that is as instant and reliable as iPhone. Running in the background, it could convert voicemail text message notifications into reliable voicemail access.

� Widgets! Google Desktop, Yahoo Widgets, and Apple Dashboard integration, so you can check your voicemail and QuickRule status at-a-glance.

� Answering options. I generally don’t want to record phone calls from my mom, so let me just start talking to people that I want to… the answering options you get when you take a call are nice, but they get in the way when dealing with people you frequently talk to. It would be nice if you could suppress them for a particular group of callers, so when you hit Talk on your phone… you can start talking to them.

� Number portability. While you can port out a number from GrandCentral, you can’t bring your number over to GrandCentral just yet. They say they’re working on it… I suspect they’re waiting to start charging people for the non-free version.

Note: GrandCentral is indeed free. However, they have said that they will charge for some non-basic features in the future, like Quick2Call. My only concern is that they may charge for more than a couple of phones to forward to… essentially making their most loyal advocates be stuck with paying to keep using the service.

As much as I support GrandCentral’s feature set as-it-is, I am not ready to start re-printing my business cards with my GrandCentral number. I am giving that number out to family so they can reach me easily. I’m also limiting it to family right now, so that if I need to bail on GrandCentral when it gets out of beta… I can do so easily. As I suspected above, I do think they will start to charge folks who have 3+ phones to forward to.

However, GrandCentral does offer a great service that is giving unified messaging services that gives the carriers a huge run for their money. AT&T’s unified messaging doesn’t offer as much as GrandCentral… and AT&T actually wants money for their service. Hopefully their final, free version will retain all the usability of their current feature set. I think GrandCentral can make a lot more money charging for new and even more innovative features than if they were to lock down part of the current feature set.