I got my invitation to GrandCentral yesterday, and I have been amazed by every minute I have used the service. It is fast, easy, fun, and works as advertised. It is free too, that’s a nice bonus.

GrandCentral is “one number to rule them all”, which is sort of hard to understand until you use it. The idea is, GrandCentral gives you a new phone number and then you add in all your other phone numbers to your account such as your mobile phone, your home phone, etc.

Once your numbers are added in, you import your contacts. This is where the fun begins, because you can set up specific rules for each contact and have them redirected to specific phones. I only have one phone, my mobile phone, but even then I find a lot of use for GrandCentral. Instead of redirecting callers to specific phones, I redirect callers to different voicemail messages - for example all my friends get a more friendly message, my family gets a message oriented toward them, and all other callers receive a business-y voicemail. If I wanted to, I could also personalise voicemail messages for individual people.

Another awesome aspect of GrandCentral is that all voicemails are recorded and stored online. For someone like myself who hates checking voicemail, this is an incredible feature that alone makes GrandCentral a killer app. You can receive notification upon new messages via email or SMS. Unfortunately, unless you have mobile internet you cannot check your messages from the phone (which I don’t mind so much - again, I am not a fan of checking voicemail ). That would be a nice development. Commenter D Murphy points out below that you can simply dial your GrandCentral number and check your voicemail that way, in a more traditional style. Very awesome! Thanks D Murphy.

There are a multitude of features that make GrandCentral a killer app for phones; no wonder Google bought it!

I look forward to continuing to use this service and exploring all the amazing features it has to offer.