Grand Central

Anyone here using Grand Central? If so, whatcha think? For those that want it, I have a few (6) invites to the Beta left, first come, first served.

I signed up for it a while ago, but I think it really depends on whether you need a service like this. It has a lot of nifty features, but the main one that I always hear people talking about is that one number will dial all your phones. I'm just not sure if that's more useful than giving people your cell phone number.

My VoIP provider already does that anyway.

The feature I like is that if I'm on my cell, and I get home or to work, I hit * and all my other phones start ringing. When I pick up the land line, I can drop the cell phone and my call is still connected. Between that and the fact that I never carry my cell phone around with me at home it makes it useful for me.

Sounds cool, except I'm in the UK and my mobile is cheaper than my land line...

Ahh well

I'd be interested in an invite...PM coming.....

Thanks, Randy

I have an account, but I'm not sure it's all that useful for my situation. I have a cell phone number that has been my only phone number for personal calls since 1999. While I do have a work phone, I don't want personal calls going there, nor do I want work calls going to my cell phone, so the idea of consolidating those doesn't appeal to me.

However, there is one potential use I can see for the service. My phone number is for an area code no longer local to where I live, so with Grand Central, I can get a local number as well, and currently at no cost. However, this solution has one flaw. If someone calls me on the GC number, it always goes to a GC voicemail box, where as if someone calls my normal number, it goes to my cell phone voicemail. Has anyone figured out a way to turn off the GC voicemail, and set a certain number (in my case the only one on the account) as the one to ring to and allow it to transfer to that voicemail service? That way, if someone calls me on the GC number, it goes to my cell phone voicemail if I don't answer.

Well, it looks like I finally have a need for this service. When I first tried it, there were only two numbers that you could reach me at: my cell and my work. And since when I'm at my work I have my cell, there wasn't really a time when I was away from my cell that would necessitate a service like this. Then they put up gates on my community's parking garage.

When I pull up to my parking garage, I swipe a keyfob to open the gate. When a guest pulls up, they have to find our name in the directory, then it dials us, and we press a number to make the garage open. The problem is that we don't have a landline phone, and only putting one of our cell phones in the system is too limiting (due to coverage, access to the phone, etc). Well, now I've added my wife's cell phone to my Grand Central account, and I'll just give the community association my Grand Central number.

I was pretty excited about the service before, but I just didn't have a use for it. Now I do, so I'm excited about it again.

This sounds very interesting, I would love an invite.

invite sent... enjoy

Anyone still have an invite?

I'm in it, but I don't see anything about invites. Maybe I'm blind.

http://groups.google.com/group/grandcentral-help-alerts/browse_thread/thread/534ba581b54e81e8

That explains that. Sorry.

Ah. Well. Nevermind then.

Land line? Oh, you mean the hole in the wall where the DSL modem is connected.

Sorry to drag up an old thread, but are invites still disabled?

Yes.

Looks like GrandCentral's replacement, Google Voice is up. Anyone have an invite?

I'm very annoyed. I managed to get an invite. I tried clicking it from my iPhone. It then said that they don't support mobile browsers and disabled the link for me to try it again from a normal browser.

Update: I went back and tried the link, and it seems like it actually worked. Or got my account into a half-setup phase where I could complete the activation. Interesting. I don't see any mechanism to send out additional invites, though.

I got my invite a little bit ago since I had a GrandCentral account. Same thing though, I don't see a place to invite others.

I'll keep an eye out for when they open it up a bit more.

Thanks, guys.

I have one spare invitation to Google Voice that just showed up in my email. First one to reply gets it.

I finally got my invite from Google directly. Seems to be working well so far.

If no-one else wants it, I wouldn't mind giving it a try...

Google just released their own Google Voice app for Android. I'm loving it so far. There was a third-party one with slightly more features, but the Google one looks nicer, I think. I can send and receive calls as my Google Voice number, and even get free SMS (which is nice because I don't have a text plan).

I've had one annoyance with the service so far. I use the number as my business number, which has been really great (especially with the voice to text emails I get when someone leaves a voicemail). I'm not sure if this will be common for everyone in the country, but for some reason there's a lot of people who, when dialing my number, have to put a 1 in front of it, even though the number is the same area code as my personal phone number. I'm not sure if this is because I do business in the Washington DC area, so I get a lot of out of state calls (out of state but like 10-20 miles away). Anyway, it is a bit of an annoyance, because I clearly don't want to make it difficult for my customers to get in touch with me.