GrandCentral: One number for all your phones

GrandCentral is another of a crop of new services that aim to improve your telephone experience through the power of the internet. What it does is give you a single phone number that, when dialed, rings all of your phones--cell, home, office--and connects the caller to whichever one you answer first. That's a nice little service on its own, but GrandCentral has some more interesting tricks up its sleeve. To begin with, you can set up rules for different callers, e.g. ring all of your phones if it's your wife, but only your office phone if it's a client, and send your mother-in-law straight to voicemail, and you can set custom MP3s to be played for different callers instead of a standard ring. Even more interesting is a feature called "ListenIn," which lets you send someone to voicemail and then listen to their message as they're recording it. You can also start recording a conversation at any time by pressing a key and switch phones in mid-call, e.g. hop from your office phone to your cell phone without skipping a beat. Voicemail storage is unlimited and you can receive your messages on the phone, via email, or on the web. And GrandCentral can block annoying callers and even claims to be able to identify callers even when they've blocked Caller ID. So, how much will all this cost you? Oddly enough, nothing. A free GrandCentral gets you all of the above with support for up to three phones, 100 minutes of incoming calls, 3 custom MP3s, and 30 days of voicemail storage. For $14.99 per month that becomes six phones, unlimited minutes, 100 MP3s, and eternal voicemail storage. Right now you can get a free 60-day trial of the premium service with no credit card required. When you sign up you get to choose your own phone number, though the area codes currently available are limited. Even though I only have one phone, I'm tempted to sign up for the other features.

[Via Lifehacker]

Tags: grandcentral, phone, telephone, voip