or, How to Blatantly Steal Ideas from the iPhone

It will come as no surprise to anyone that I’ve got a minor case of geeklust for the iPhone. It might be a surprise that I’m not expecting to be an early adopter. For one thing, I can’t have one yet, and there’s nothing like delayed gratification to kill off the geek libido. For another, there’s a very long list of specifications that makes me drool quite a bit more over the Nokia N95, at least the next time I feel like dropping nearly a grand on a phone.

But this post isn’t about that. It’s about one feature of the iPhone that I wanted immediately when I saw it demoed: visual voicemail.

My relationship with voice communications is rather strained, especially for a guy who’s had around a dozen cell phones and two dozen phone numbers (including a 500 and 700 number, if anyone remembers those services). I’m horrible about keeping up with voice messages. I hate having to skip through 12 messages to get to the one I know I need. And it drives me nuts that I have yet one more nonfungible bucket collecting important messages, when 95% of everything else is routed to my email.

Enter GrandCentral, currently in public beta. Sign up with them and they give you a free phone number in an area code of your choosing. Then plug in all of your other phone numbers. When someone calls your GrandCentral number, all of your phones simultaneously ring. That by itself is fairly nifty, but since I’ve been a cell-phone only guy for ten years, I’m interested in their other services.

You can record incoming calls. You can drop someone into voicemail and listen to the message live, then pick up if you decide you want to talk to them. You can switch a call from one phone to another (i.e., off a landline and onto your cell). And you can get all of your voice messages stored on a website that’s accessible with mechanisms similar to visual voicemail.

But hey, that’s not all. Hook up GrandCentral with a free Gizmo Project account, and you can have your calls ring through to your computer. Or you could use Skype’s SkypeIn service. The difference is that SkypeIn is $38 a year, but Gizmo will give you a 775 area code for free. (Gizmo charges $35 if you want to pick your area code like you can with Skype.) And unlike SkypeIn, Gizmo 775 calls show up on the recipient’s caller ID. Last time I checked, SkypeOut calls instead provide the rather disturbing 1-000-012-3456 as your phone number.

I’ve been doing my experimenting with this at 2 AM, so I haven’t yet run many tests on voice quality. (Except for the guy in Italy whom I dialed up by mistake. Sorry about that.) But so far it’s been peachy keen enough for me to recommend it, and I’ve been giving out my GrandCentral number for the last week. The most fun I’ve had so far: in order to run a ring test, I used SkypeOut to call GrandCentral to ring through to my cell phone and Gizmo accounts simultaneously. I was somewhat amazed when it worked perfectly, although I was careful not to say anything, lest I created an echo that ripped a hole in the space-time continuum.

What I’m looking forward to doing is switching my calls over to Gizmo when I’m communing with my laptop. This puts incoming caller ID onscreen, and I can use my MacBook’s audio to take the call. This also means fewer cell minutes burned, and I can shut off the phone to save battery power. Finally, I’ve rigged my cell phone to stop using T-Mobile’s voicemail, so anyone calling my old number will still get fed into my GrandCentral visual voicemail system.

(Check with your cellular provider before you do this; they charge different rates for forwarded minutes and regular minutes. I discovered this years ago when AT&T billed me $300 for usage over my regular plan, which was unlimited minutes. I spent hours on the phone asking customer service reps how I exceeded an infinite number.)

So, for those of you who have my phone number already, drop me a line to get my new numbers. You can still reach me on the cell number you have, but I’ll prefer to take calls on the new GrandCentral number. (And of course, hang onto my cell in case GrandCentral goes kablooey.) You only need the 775 number if you want to know it’s me when that number pops up on your caller ID; call me there and you’re quite likely to miss me.

For those of you who don’t have my number, check out this nifty widget.