WAY TO SMS

GOOGLE VOICE
Who gives their home phone a second thought these days? Cellular is where it's at: Mobile phones are personal and move with us; they carry our identities. The old, wired "landline" phones tie us down. But while anchored to the past, innovation for the home telephone is not dead. Two giant companies have new and interesting products for consumers that redefine what you can do with a home telephone. One is very smart.
Google Voice is the search company's interesting and powerful new telephone service. Based on Grand Central, which Google acquired in 2007, it might make you re-think the utility of your landline home phone. Google Voice is, essentially, a telephone phone service without its own telephone connections. When you sign up for Google Voice and get a new number for the service (in your own local area code), it lets people call you and leave messages, which you can listen to on your computer, on your personal Google Voice Web page. And once you tell Google Voice where you want to be contacted by voice, it will start automatically routing incoming calls to any phones you want. You can have your Google Voice number redirected to your home phone or your mobile phone or your work phone -- or all at once. You can tell Google Voice that people calling from your group of friends always reach your mobile, or that certain family members never reach you at work. You also get an SMS (text message) inbox for your number. Messages can get forwarded to your mobile phone if you like, and you can reply to them there, or you can see and send messages via your Web-connected computer.