May you be in Heaven half an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead – Irish toast
You may be wondering whether to make the move from GrandCentral to Google Voice. The simple answer is, do it!
The #1 thing you’ll get is cheap international calls from your cell phone – with Google standing behind it. And you’ll get SMS support, voicemail message transcripts and conference calls.
But before you make the change, there’s a few things you should be ready for:
- Your Contacts won’t automatically come over into Google Voice;
- You can export your Contacts into Google Voice;
- You can’t export customized greetings, phone settings and group settings.
- Your Messages won’t come over into Google Voice;
- You can’t export your Messages into Google Voice.
So before you move over, do the following:
- Save or delete all your GrandCentral messages. (Access to them may stop suddenly someday, so dealing with them fully now is the only safe approach.)
- Export your GrandCentral address book. Sign into GrandCentral; click the Address Book tab and click Export - choose CSV file; save the file to your desktop, or someplace else appropriate.
That’s it! You’re prepared. In the next post, I’ll describe how to get Google Voice set up quickly and easily.
Please invite me!!! I’m getting a new phone number in 1 week and really want to give out my Google Voice # instead.
Hi Benjamin,
This is a blog about Google Voice, but we can’t give you an account. The only way to get one right now is to buy a GrandCentral account on eBay or elsewhere and upgrade it, or buy a Google Voice account from someone who already upgraded their GrandCentral account to Google Voice.
Google is starting to be a bit slow on this one – they promised Google Voice “in a few weeks” about two months ago! And if past practice is any indication, they may limit invitations for many months even after they ship it, to keep from overloading the service.
Having said that, you’re exactly right to want to get a Google Voice number to use with your new phone right from the start. It’s exactly how you should do it – that way you don’t give out your phone’s actual number widely. Hope you get a solution in time.
Google has said that it may offer the ability to “convert” your phone number to become a Google Voice number, but there’s no commitment that it will definitely happen, and no indication as to when it might. This would make moving to Google Voice far easier.
Cheers,
Floyd