GrandCentral - Perhaps the bigest thing in years
posted in Technology |Last week, David Pogue of the NY Times wrote an article on a new service called GrandCentral. After reading the article I went right over to their site and signed up for the beta (for free). After just one day, I have to say that if you have more than one phone, this service will forever change your life, even if it winds up costing $14.95 per month afterwards.
Grand central provides you with a telephone number that you can give out to anyone to call. When someone calls this number any or all of you phones will ring. All calls go to a centralized voicemail box that can be listened to from any phone, the web, or email. You can customize features by one of four groups, friends, family, work and other, or you can customize at the individual caller level. Feature that can be customized include: Call blocking, voice mail greating, phones that will ring, what the ring-back tone is and more. Voice mail messages are stored indefinitely, and HERE IS THE KILLER FEATURE - Ever listen to someone on you home answering machine before you picked up the phone? Well you can do exactly that with GrandCentral. Press 3 when they call and they go to voicemail and you can listen real-time to the message as they leave it. Press * anytime during the message and you can pick up the call.
Walking into the house on a GrandCentral call that came into you cell phone? Press * to transfer it to your home phone.
Right now the numbers are only in a limited number of area codes, but there are enough that anyone on the left or right coasts of the USA should be able to get one close to their home.
This is a great brilliant idea. Be sure to check it out.
