One Number That Will Ring All Your Phones

The basic idea around GrandCentral is one phone number for all your phones, for life. As we change jobs, home city or cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is a really very painful. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number to all of your acquaintances.

GrandCentral offers many features that complement the phone services you already use. If you have multiple phone numbers (e.g., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones, based on who’s calling. This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job. The service also gives you one central voice mailbox. You can listen to your voicemails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more. You can even listen in on voicemail messages from your phone while they are being recorded, or switch a call from your cell phone to your desk phone and back again. All in all, you’ll have a lot more control over your phones.

Here’s a list of some of the features:

• Caller Naming: Every GrandCentral caller is announced by name when you answer the phone. (“Call from Manoj Gupta.”)

• Incoming phone calls ring on different phones according to which group you’ve placed a caller’s phone number in.

• Customize Greetings Control freaks, rejoice,etc. You can actually record a different voice mail greeting for each person in your address book: “Hi, sweetheart” for your sweetheart; “Can’t take your call right now, I’m in meeting” for your mother or friends, et cetera.

• Voice mail can be stored indefinitely.

• Voice mail can be listened to and replied to easily.

• Voice mail messages can be listened to in real time and you can jump in to initiate a conversation in real time.

• Telemarketers or others can be banished to the spam folder so if you’re called by the same number again your phone will simply not ring.

• You can click to have GrandCentral call both the person who left a message and your phone.

• You can record a section of any call with one button on the keypad of your phone. But laws in some states require both parties to know that a call is being recorded.Grancentral maintains and follows with the state laws.

• You can seamlessly switch from one of your phones to another.

• Switch Lines: Anytime during a call, you can press the * key to make all of your phones ring again, so that you can pick up on a different phone in midconversation, unbeknownst to the person on the other end. For example, if you’re heading out the door, you can switch a landline call to your cellphone — or as you arrive home, a cell call to a landline, in order to save airtime minutes.

• Quick Changes: With a quick click at GrandCentral.com, you can direct all calls to voice mail when you don’t want to be disturbed; direct all calls to a new, temporary number (like a hotel); or prevent your home line from ringing during work hours.

Unfortunately, right now the GrandCentral service is restricted to those who have a U.S. telephone numbers and also the service isn’t accepting new users at this time. However you can “reserve” a number by submitting your name and email address on the website.Click here to do so.