Hugo’s blog

I was curious about GrandCentral, so I requested an invitation and received it today.

GrandCentral gives you one meta-phone number, which you can use to make all phone lines ring: your home phone, your cell, your work line, etc. In addition, it provides voicemail that can be accessed online and can send you email when somebody leaves a message.

Activation

Activation was easy: you enter your account details (who you are, email address, your phone numbers, etc.), GrandCentral calls you, you key in the confirmation code that you’ve been given on screen, and you’re good to go.

Calls

When somebody calls your number, GrandCentral picks up, asks the person to state their name. Then, GrandCentral calls all your lines, you pickup, and they give you the option of picking up the call, sending to voicemail, etc.

That puts a couple of extra steps between the caller dialing and your really picking up the call, which may be tedious. For example, the caller hears the line ringing while your phone rings, you pick up the line and you go through the system’s choices. You have to hope that the caller is not impatient.

Also, you need to disable voicemail on your lines, otherwise GrandCentral is going to start talking to your voicemail system. Actually, GrandCentral’s recommendation is to make your voicemail message longer than 15 seconds for things to go well – i.e. is that they talk to your greeting. In both cases, that makes calling your land line or cell phone directly more painful to your friends (20 seconds before switching to voicemail + 15 seconds of interaction before getting to voicemail).

Comparison with Vonage

Being a long-time Vonage user, I already have some of the features that GrandCentral offers. Vonage does provide voicemail that I can get via the Web, by email, and I set it up to notify me by SMS on my cell phone.

What is new is that you can have all your lines ring at the same time. Well, actually, as I was looking at Vonage’s Web site, I noticed that Vonage allows you to do that as well (they call it SimulRing). People with standard phone lines may be attracted by this, though you could always use call forwarding have the call sent to your cell, that you’re likely to have with you.

So I guess that what is really new is that it’s free, and that there’s a number of cool little tricks that GrandCentral can do, like archive a conversation that you’ve had, or listen on the voicemail that the caller is recording and decide to pick up (just like with old time answering machines). Actually, those are probably premium features, and only the core of the system will still be free after the beta is over.

I’m not a heavy phone user, and Vonage already does everything I need (and more) and most of what GrandCentral does, so I haven’t fallen in love with GrandCentral yet.