Google Voice, formerly GrandCentral, is a seriously heavyweight product. When it relaunched in March, just a couple of months ago, we gave Google Voice a glowing review.
Once you’ve jumped in head first to the product it will straighten out your phone life forever. You’ll never have to worry about figuring out which phone numbers to give to different people. Give them one number – your Google Voice number – and then use rules to determine where your calls go based on who’s calling and what you are doing.
There are significant switching costs, though. You have to tell everyone your new phone number and get them to start using that, instead. New business cards have to be printed, which is another cost. For most people, that’s just too much heavy lifting to fully embrace the service. And there’s the additional problem of your outbound calls and outbound text messages showing the phone number of the device you are calling from instead of your Google Voice number. Your friends need to store that number or they won’t know who’s calling. And once it’s stored, they’ll use it, bypassing all the great voicemail and call routing features of Google Voice.
But Google has a plan to deal with all of these issues, we’ve heard. And it starts with Number Portability.
