I’ve been a GMail user for years now, so I was a little excited to hear that Google bought out Grand Central.  Mainly because all of the google apps are so nice..  Google Voice would eventually be cleanly integrated into Google’s apps.

So, the first shortcoming with Grand Central was that my contact list was always out of sync with my HTC Touch Pro running Windows Mobile.  Sure I could manually export from one and import into the other, but that’s a bit of a pain.  With Google Voice, I’m now configured to use activesync on the phone to sync to google’s server.

What it means is that my phone and my google calendar and contact list are always in sync, changing one instantly affects the other via push technology.  After an hour or so merging all of my contacts, I ended up with one clean list of contacts.  Now I even have all of my contacts’ email addresses on my phone, something I never bothered to do before.

Now, with all of my GV contacts constantly in sync with my phone, the next issue was calling them with the GV number so that other people would return my calls appropriately, as I’ve disabled my cellular voicemail.  Enter iDialer and iContact.  This clever piece of software allows profiles for use with Grand Central, Google Voice, Calling cards, Cellular, etc..  But the effect is that now; with this fancy dialer, my calls are all routed through GV automatically.  This works by calling my GV#, pressing 2, and dialing my contact’s #.  It’s a fairly acceptable method vs. callback, and for any of us with unlimited calls to our favorite #s, we’ve now got unlimited outgoing calls.  If you don’t mind not having caller-id and using call presentation, you can have unlimited incoming calls too.

Next up, SMS, GV has some nice options for text messages, allowing viewing and responding via the website, but they also enable both via the phone, by essentially bridging the SMS through another number.  This wreaks havoc on my contact list, as I can’t possibly guess which number is going to be used for each of my contacts, but it still works.  I wouldn’t mind knowing if those numbers are static, so that I can save them to the contact.

The voicemail transcription is a bit funny at this point, but I can see it being valuable in situations where the message is well articulated.  I’m still looking for a visual voicemail app, and hope someone will release one in the near future, but until then, I’ll walk to a computer or open PocketIE..