automaticable

GrandCentral has been in the news a lot recently, as Google finally moved its newly-acquired startup from closed-beta to open-beta. Using GrandCentral, you can get a new phone number that intercepts calls and does all sorts of cool things before forwarding to your current number. And now that it’s open, anybody can sign up to give it a try. I’m in the market for a new cell phone, and so I was looking it over to see if it’d be the right time to test it out. It has a lot of cool features, but overall I think it’s not quite ready. Here’s the breakdown:

What’s Useful

These are the features that really make GrandCentral a useful service. This isn’t a complete list of features, but the rest are more novelty in my opinion.

• Forward your GrandCentral Number to multiple lines: This is the most basic use of GrandCentral. It gives you one phone number to use as a “virtual number” to use as you wish. Have it ring just your cell phone. Or your house phone too. Or your house phone, cell phone, work phone, and Pizza Hut– the options are limitless, and potentially ridiculous.
• Number in Your Code: When signing up, you can choose from a list of numbers in your local area code. That way, your friends won’t have to call long-distance to reach you.
• Visual Voicemail: This was all-the-rage when the iPhone came out, was the ability to see your voicemail on your phone. GrandCentral takes it a step farther, and puts it online and in your email as well. Similar to Gmail’s philosophy, never delete a message, so you can come back to it and search through later.
• Caller ID: Caller ID is offered as a basic service on most cellphones, but GrandCentral takes it a step further. It’ll maintain your address book online, which makes searching easy. When you get a call from an unknown number, you have the option of letting it through, or “screening” them for their name first. Even better, GrandCentral does some automatic “spam filtering”, to keep the unwanted salesmen out. If this is anything like Gmail’s spam filter, it could be a killer feature.
• Customizable Caller Groups: They’ve explored all sorts of options with this one. Once you assign your contacts “caller groups”, you can customize the way your service based on each group. Have your house phone ring only for your family, automatically send your ex-girlfriend to voicemail, and set a special voicemail message that your co-workers will hear.

What’s Fun

GrandCentral offers some other fun perks that aren’t necessarily deal-breakers either way, but they’re neat to play around with.

• “ListenIn” on Voicemail: When you get an incoming call, you can send the caller straight to voicemail, and then listen to the message as they record it. Fun, and a little creepy too.
• Change Your Ringer: Any cell phone has the ability to change-up your ringtone. But with GrandCentral, you can also customize the “ringer” that people hear when they call you. Choose from a few different nationalities, or have “NY Voice” harass callers as they wait for you to answer. Before Google acquired GrandCentral, there was also the ability to upload or record your own– we’ll see if this feature comes back.
• Switch Phones mid-call: While you’re talking to a buddy on one phone, you can switch the conversation to another phone with the click of a button. The use case they give is if you’re talking long-distance on your cell phone, but want to continue the conversation on the home phone when you get home, to save a few minutes.

What’s Lacking

For me, these were the deal breakers that I just couldn’t live without. I hope GrandCentral and Google are working together on these features, because they will truely have a useful service once they’re implemented. But without them, I can’t imagine committing to a GrandCentral phone number.

• No SMS Support: That’s right– if you plan on giving out your GrandCentral number to all of your friends, make sure they know that it’s not possible to text message you, or vice-versa. Of course, if you don’t like paying the premiums for text-messaging service, this could be a blessing in disguise.
• Outgoing Calls Display Physical Phone Number: Imagine you start using GrandCentral and tell all of your friends to update their phones with the new number. They’ll start calling you with the “virtual number”, but there’s no way that you can call them using this number (except from the website). It would be a little confusing if all calls from you came in on some old number.
• Can’t “Port” Existing Numbers: If you want to start using GrandCentral, you have to commit to using their phone number. This means telling all of your family and friends to update their contact lists and start using the new number. It might be even more confusing for them when they accidentally call your old number, and it still works. Also consider the fact that once you start using a GrandCentral number, you’re locked in– no “switching” this number to another service. Everyone knows that Google isn’t “evil”, but what if they started moving some of these features to a premium-membership paid service?

What’s to Come?

Like I mentioned before, I sincerely hope that the lacking features above are changed, to make GrandCentral really useful. But there’s also a few others that we could tack on, to really make it a killer service. And with Google backing it, I think some of these may already be in the works.

• Forward SMS To/From Email: I’m not a fan of text-messaging in general, but I certainly wouldn’t want my incoming messages to just disappear. I think it would be nice, and completely feasible, for GrandCentral to “intercept” text messages and send them to email instead, where you could similarly reply to them. Added bonus that it would be free.
• 100% Free Calling: Google has already rolled-out the free GOOG-411; why not make GrandCentral calls toll-free as well? GOOG-411 is completely ad-free, but I don’t think users would mind listening to a short ad before voicemai in return for free incoming and outgoing calls. Of course, I hope this would be optional as well.
• VOIP Integration: Right now, you can have your GrandCentral number dial your cellphone and your house phone. Wouldn’t it be cool if it would dial your computer as well, using Skype (or something less proprietary). Answering calls while you’re at your computer anyway would be convenient, and save you a couple bucks.
• GPhone Compatible: Now that Google is officially entering the cell-phone market with Android, it’s almost a given that we’ll see slick integration with GrandCentral and it’s other services. I imagine we’ll see an integrated visual-voicemail interface and advanced caller-id and screening, but what else could they roll out?

All-in-all, I think there’s a lot of cool things that are happening with GrandCentral. But, it’s still young, and it has a ways to go. Keep checking up on it, because with Google fostering it, I think we are going to see a lot of neat things happening.

If you're new here, you can subscribe to automaticable's RSS feed by clicking here. Or, you can get post updates through your email. Thanks for visiting!