I just signed up for Google’s latest acquisition, GrandCentral. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into, but after the process, I have to say that I was impressed by the features and the technology.

What is GrandCentral? The short answer is: You get a new GrandCentral phone number, input all (or some) of your other telephone numbers, so that you have one consolidated number for people to reach you, wherever you are. It also has several more online features that make it attractive for those whose telephone is as important or more important than email. You can import your contact list, view call logs, record calls, screen and block calls, etc.

Some of the technology has been around in VOIP phone systems, but they’ve managed to bring it to the masses here. Note that as of this writing, it’s still in beta. Also, Google just made some of the advanced features free, but note that the terms of service states that it can change and charge for these again at some point in the future.

The first thing to do is sign up for a free account at the GrandCentral home page. Look for the “Reserve” button. They’ve done a nice job with the website. It guided me through the process and I easily made my way through the setup.

To start, you select an area code or a geographic location. I chose my local area code, so that it would be a local call for most of my contacts, but you could chose any area you like, as long as there is a number available. Within my area code, there were probably a dozen numbers available. Other neighorhoods nearby had only one or two numbers. I also picked a number that was easy to dial, in other words, the keys are laid out in such a way that the number can be dialed quickly.

After you’ve selected a number you can authenticate via telephone. It rang my phone and I pressed a code. I was also able to record my name and a greeting. You can change it later on, in fact you can create several greetings and choose contacts or groups that hear a particlar greeting.

You can type in or import your address book contacts. I use Apple Mail, so I exported by addresses in the vCard format, but it supports Outlook, Outlook Express, CSV, Yahoo and Gmail address books as well.

One of the first things I tried was the Call Record feature. Its not that I need to record every call I’m on, but its a cool way to digitize sound and share it with others. I used my cell phone indoors so my reception was poor, but it recorded well and I was able to listen to the conversation online.

When you login to GrandCentral, you are presented with your Inbox. There are two links, Messages and Call Log. It listed one default message and the calls I made to test.

You can sort the calls by type, time, caller, calling phone number, flagged messages and notes. You can click on the callers name. It takes you to an edit screen where you can edit the contact name, edit, delete or regroup the contact.

You can do more than that from that page, such as selecting custom ringtones for the contact (they call them RingShares and you can choose from a preset list). You can also select a specific phone you want to ring when this caller calls you. You can send the user to voicemail, block, mark them as spam. You can see a listing of all calls to or from the user. You can click on the call and do even more on each call, such as forward, reply, download, add notes, map (in Google Maps of course) and post the call to a website.

I’ll add more to this review in the next few weeks…