Free Google Voice Cellphone App: Send/Recieve Free calls/texts from your mobile phone using NO minutes!

Matt Marshall of Venture Beat writes a glowing review of Google Voice,formerly Grand Central, to be rolled out to previous lucky users tomorrow (Thurs, 3/12) with new users allowed to access the service within "the next few weeks".

He writes: 

"I’ve played with it and am sold. It adds free transcription to your voice messages on a tidy Web page, as well as SMS forwarding to your cell phone, and host of other goodies I’m convinced will make a lot of people run out and start using it. It’s free for national calls, and competitively priced for international calls. You can use it from your mobile phone (www.google.com/voice/m) — that’s right, free calls from your mobile phone. My favorite: a way to forward unwanted stalkers to a message that says your phone has disconnected."

In addition to the new voicemail transcription service, Google voice offers a host of other features:

– In the transcribed text, lighter font shows you where Google isn’t certain of the exact wording (see image above). Darker font shows where Google is more certain. I’ve blotted out the incoming numbers with red squares to protect the numbers of friends who tried this out.
– You can share your voice messages with other people, clicking to get code so that you can embed the messages on any Web page. You can download them if you want.
– You can report people as spam, so they won’t ring through to any phone (Google also tracks calls across its network, and when it notices that hundreds of thousands of calls are being made from a single origin number, it can choose to block that as spam).
– My favorite: You can send someone to a message that says, “We’re sorry, you’ve reached a number that is no longer connected.” The message is the same message you’re used to hearing when you call a bad number, so it’s quite convincing.
– It uses the same contact list in your existing Gmail account. You can import contacts from most other sources if you want.
– When using the SMS feature, if there’s a number listed in the message, you can click on it to make a call out.
– It allows conference calling from your phone for up to six people.
– The international rates are competitive with other services such as Skype. For example, it costs 2 cents per minute to call most European countries in the middle of the day, or 15 cents to reach a cell phone there. That compares to about $1.50 if you use your regular carrier to make such a cell phone call.
– It interfaces with other services that are open. So while it won’t let you accept calls from people using your Skype handle (because Skype’s protocol is proprietary), it does work with SIP-based services like Gizmo.
– It offers transparent billing information with things like the time of day you called, how long you called for, who you called, where and how much it cost.
– You can add notes to your messages.
– You can add personalized greetings for specific people.
– If you’re using an Android phone, incoming calls can pull up the picture of the person calling you.