When I initially discussed GrandCentral, I was given a special conditional call forwading code which enabled my phone to send voicemail messages directly into GrandCentral as opposed to my carrier. This is great for people managing a lot of numbers and as it was pre-iPhone, at the time offered a way to get something like Apple’s soon to launch Visual Voicemail.
I am a few devices later now, and have been craving the Grandcentral voicemail features again and decided to set it up for myself this time (thanks to Phoneboy for the search suggestion).
With a simple code, you can initiate conditional call forwarding on your GSM phone and choose where to send calls….
Dial: *61*yournumber# and hit send. I’ve entered my GrandCentral number as my number, but really you can do this for any number you want. Dialing ##61# and send should return things the way they were if you prefer.
From here it’s a matter of choosing how you’d like to use GrandCentral… The simplest way is to just call your own number when you want to retrieve a message – which is suggested in the alert txt. If you’d like access to a more visual style you need to fire up your browser and check out the m.grandcentral.com site.
As you can see from the N95 screenshots below, GrandCentral offers a pretty robust way to manage voicemail. You can see who’s left new messages, review a historical listing, listen and easily call people back — using your GrandCentral number as the outbound CallerID.
As an added bonus to me, I no longer get the encoded double txt alerts from ATT’s Visual Voicemail system.
