That means you'll be able to port the phone number you've had for 5 or 10 or 100 years to Google Voice and use whatever phone you want, whenever you want, on whatever carrier you want, with your current number—meaning you'll never have to worry about your phone number again. Right now, you can kinda hack it by forwarding calls from your current number to your Google Voice number, but you're stuck with pitfalls like texts not being forwarded. Google's also got an app cooking that'll route outbound calls through Google Voice as well, so the service is more seamless—currently, your outbound caller ID is whatever's actually assigned to the phone you're using. Update: Lifehacker pointed out a few months ago that Google mentioned the possibility in their support pages, but TechCrunch specifies Google is testing it now and that it'll roll out later this year.

I have to say, it's been interesting watching carriers become more and more irrelevant over the last two years. Their fears of becoming a "dumb pipe" are certainly coming true, and cutting the core of your mobile identity—your phone number—completely out of their hands has to be at least a little bit scary for them.

Now if Google would just solve GV's other major flaw—actually letting people in. [TechCrunch]

The app comes with a dialer, which dials out (from your Google Voice number), and rings your iPhone to connect both sides. It works with a dialpad or your contact list, plus you can also SMS people the same way. There's other standard Google Voice features like call log and voicemail, which you can listen to much the same way as iPhone's voicemails.

iPod touch users, who can't really take advantage of the dialing stuff, can still use the GV app as a mobile control center to have it ring their standard cellphones. We'll let you know when the app hits. [Google and Sean Kovacs via 9 to 5 Mac]

For those of you who haven't heard of it, GrandCentral/Google Voice is an online phone consolidation service. Basically, you pick a single phone number for your account, and have Google Voice—which can manage calls, voicemail and now SMS—route contact to that number to any number of other phones. It's sort of like a web-based switchboard for all your devices.

Google has preserved GrandCentral's functionality, and added a few features to their web client. For example, now you can see your voicemails collected on your PC and transcribed, or have a voicemail transcription sent to your phones via SMS. Speaking of SMS support, that gaping hole that blighted the old GrandCentral, it is now included and logged accordingly. Conference calling and cheap international rates are also available through the client.

Google Voice is in beta, but it's one of those trademark soft, open, indefinite Googly betas. It's closed to everyone except previous GrandCentral users, and the company says that the beta will open to the rest of us "soon". [Google]

The call redirection worked great in our tests. You can manually set calls to route to either your iPhone or your "local" landline, which is programmed via location detection and can automatically switch when you get to a certain place, like home or work. Outgoing calls from your Newber number are shown as your Newber number, which is fantastic for hiding your real number from business contacts or people you don't quite trust. What's not cool, unfortunately, is Newber doesn't have access to your favorites list, so you'll have to re-add your favorites from your contacts list (which it does have access to).

Compared to GrandCentral, Newber is still missing features like being able to ring multiple phones simultaneously, listening in on voicemail as it's being recorded, and having people announce their names before you pick up (or deny) the call.

The biggest difference between the two is that Newber costs $5 a month and 2 cents a minute, whereas GrandCentral is free. Is being able to route your calls to your landline automatically worth what's essentially long distance rates? Tough to say. But they're still in beta, and it may be possible that they'll tweak prices a bit before launching fullscale. [Newber via Chip Chick]

Related: Gizmodo's Essential Iphone Apps

When you sign up for PhoneTag, which formerly went by the incredibly nerdy name SimulScribe, you get a phone number to add to your GrandCentral account. When you miss a call, PhoneTag picks it up and records the message. The speech is converted to text, which is then sent to you via email or text message, along with an audio attachment of the voicemail—two things Grand Central doesn't do. If you add your contact list to your PhoneTag account, the messages will appear from the senders so you can reply through email right away. PhoneTag is free for a month, and plans range from $0.35/message to $30/month for unlimited messages. [PhoneTag]

Other cool features: caller and visual ID, listening to people as they leave voicemails, MP3 ringtones for the callers, call blocking (YES!), call recording, and voicemail storage. The free trial only gives you 100 minutes a month, and it's $14.99 for the premium version. Best yet, you can pick your own area code, so you can establish a presence in various parts of the country. – Jason Chen

Product Page [GrandCentral via Lifehacker]