I know I should be saving my Wows for Windows Vista, but I’m spending them all on GrandCentral. David Pogue talked about the service last week and I set up an account, just for kicks, to see how it worked. I didn’t really play with it until today and I’m really blown away.
The service is fairly simple. You give it all of your phone numbers and it funnels calls through a pre-selected phone number of your choosing. For example, I’m always testing phones and we have Vonage at home. So I could feasibly set it up to call all of my phones at once. The services also allows me to screen calls and listen to voicemail online.
The system allows you to create your own ringback tones and you can pass calls from phone to phone like the kid in Heroes. You can also ban numbers to do-not-call hell and there’s even a strange spam filter that prevents telemarketers from bothering you. In all, it’s quite amazing.
How much does it cost? It’s free and it’s fabulous. Give it a go before they start charging.