In 2007, Google bought US telephone service GrandCentral and promptly closed access to new members. Everything went quiet, development apparently stopped and it seemed that was it. Well today the Google Mobile Blog has announced a relaunch of the free service, rebranded Google Voice.

Google voice is a kind of cloud service for your phone(s) in the same way that GMail is for your mail, calendars and contacts. It offers a huge list of features, these are my favourite:

• You have one phone number, and calls can be routed to all or any of your physical telephones.
• It will give you the option to answer, reject etc based on who is calling, and will even allow you to give a ‘this number is no longer in use’ message – useful for telemarketing calls.
• It will also allow you to seamlessly switch phones mid-call, good for switching from land line to mobile if you are heading out for example.
• All of your text messages, voicemail and contacts are stored and are accessible from the online interface, and are available no matter how many times you change your phone, carrier etc.

New features are currently only available to pre-existing GrandCentral users, but Google expects to be offering it to new users within the next few weeks. No word on UK availability, but I would guess it is some way off.

David Pogue has a full run down of the service over at the NY Times.

UPDATE: Lifehacker has a good rundown of the new features along with screenshots and videos.