GrandCentral relaunches as Google Voice

Google announced Wednesday, March 11th that their telephony service, GrandCentral (acquired by Google in July of 2007) will relaunch and rebrand as the new, improved, Google Voice.

In addition to most, if not all, of the features included in GrandCentral, users will be able to access text transcriptions of voicemails left on their Google Voice number, receive and send SMS messages through the service, and use their Google Voice number for conference calling.
It still remains to be seen if Google will continue to support free Gizmo support, a feature in GrandCentral that does not seem to be an option in Google Voice evidenced in their demo videos.

Since the acquisition, Google has closed its doors to new users of the GrandCentral service, and all was quiet. After their announcement of cutbacks and the stopping of development of a few of their services, speculation started, stating that Google would soon axe GrandCentral, which had been devoid of updates for 2 years.

Google has begun rolling out upgrades to existing GrandCentral users, and will soon open Google Voice to all users with a Google account, available for free.

(Source: Official Google Voice Blog)