Missing Google Voice Feature Gives Me a Bad Connection

3147798491-googlevoice_03My patience was rewarded over the weekend: the GrandCentral beta account I opened in July of 2007 is now a Google Voice account. I can now use one single number for centralized voice communications, routing calls to various phones. I tested the voicemail and the transcription via SMS works great as well. I also made Google my “book of record” for Contacts some time ago, and even though the Contact app is still underpowered, this was a good move for me. There’s only one problem: nobody really has my Google Voice phone number.

Since GrandCentral was a beta service and I had no idea that Google might buy them, I never fully embraced the offering. Back then, I didn’t know if the service would survive or slowly fade away. So now, only a handful of folks actually have the phone number that GrandCentral assigned to me way back when. Now I could use the handy little e-mail generator in Google Voice to notify a thousand people, but I really don’t want to burden them with managing my information. (That’s one reason I’m liking Palm’s upcoming Pre: the Synergy function requires other folks to manage their contact info for me. I can kick back into “contact-management auto-pilot”!)

A far better choice is one that I don’t have: porting an existing cell-phone number over to Google Voice. That would be the ideal solution for me to jump in the Google Voice pool with both feet. Aside from the tons of contacts I have in Google, there are hundreds of folks that have my current cell number, but aren’t in my contacts list: folks like exhibitors at trade shows and PR people. I can’t easily tell them about my new Google Voice number, so number portability would be ideal here.

Google knows that this might be an appealing option: on their Google Voice suggestion page, it’s one of the pre-filled suggestions and I duly clicked a vote for it. Until I see that feature, I’m hard-pressed to fully use the new service I waited for.

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