Goin’ Mobile With GrandCentral

Over the past few days the blogosphere has been buzzing with news about client GrandCentral and their new GrandCentral Mobile.

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington first broke the news following an impromptu lunch with GrandCentral CEO Craig Walker, followed by GigaOm and WebWare.

Other bloggers have weighed in too with comments and accolades including Pat from Roam4Free, CrunchGear’s Peter Ha and Jonathan Green, who hints at some cool features that the dynamic duo (Craig and Vincent) are toying around with.

Personally I have it running on the new Nokia Nseries N95 that are now part of the Nokia Blogger Relations Program and also my brand spanking new Nokia E61i. For Crackberry addicts, it really shines too. Just bookmark your GrandCentral Mobile page and call away.

As long as you have a mobile data plan, GCM (GrandCentral Mobile) give you a lot of control over your voice mail. The coolest factor is the first thing you see are your NEW messages. You can also go into your never ending inbox, change your call destinations and most importantly place yourself into Do Not Disturb Mode or add a quick temporary call destination.

While GCM is still beta, my experience over the past few days has been one of catching one bug, that was fixed in seconds, and then enjoying setting up calls and triggering them easily, and making them at no cost.

So who does this impact? Well if you’re traveling this makes it easy to return calls quickly, and to display your GC number. Eventually, GCM will be international, so it means you can bridge calls and take advantage of cheaper calling since calls received in many countries are free, and the GC legs of the call will be at bulk rate prices. Lastly if you’re a Jajah or Rebtel user this pretty much gives you a reason to switch because the key attractor of making a call for less money is there, but now you have a higher degree of functionality as it’s tied to your voice mail, so there’s no longer the need to listen in one service and then return the call in another. And for me, that always was a hang-up!