If you’re short on time, here’s the punchline – buying an unlocked Google Nexus One is horrible because neither Google nor T-Mobile can get you up and running quickly unless you know what to ask. If you want this phone, just get a contract and be done with it – the two companies haven’t figured out how to support users who come in with a device in hand. Here’s my saga in a few steps:

1. Ordered Google Nexus One unlocked from the online store.
2. Went into T-Mobile and got offered a FlexPay plan – no monthly contract and plenty of options for unlimited or metered voice, text, and Internet.
3. After a few clicks, I had everything up and running – Gmail, Google Calendar, and all of the other core services tied to my Google account. So far so good.

And then I got to Google Voice. Everything went fine until I went to set up my voicemail. All I wanted to do was to forward my voicemail from the Nexus One to my Google Voice number using conditional forwarding. The helper wizard on the device couldn’t make it work. The directions available on the Google Voice site didn’t work. So I picked up the phone and called T-Mobile. They were very pleasant, kind, and helpful, even though they regularly admitted they didn’t know much about the device.

I read the T-Mobile forums prior to the call and a lot of users suggested that you can’t actually do conditional voicemail forwarding if you’re on a FlexPay plan – they simply don’t allow you to do so. I broght this point up repeatedly during my roughly 1 hour call with their support folks. Finally, after some patient work by a Tier 3 unsupported deice rep, we both figured it out – it’s my plan, not the device. After about 30 minutes with the billing department, who kept trying to get me back to technical support, I finally just gave up and told them I wanted to cancel my account. It turns out there actually isn’t a way to convert from a FlexPay month-to-month plan to a postpaid account. And here’s the kicker – even if you bring your own device, signing up for a postpaid account obligates you to sign up for a contract. I don’t mind signing up for a contract if you’re subsidizing my device. But if I’m bringing my own phone, I find that to be a bit insulting.

So now I have this Nexus One and can’t use it seamlessly with Google Voice. It’s a phone, right? This should be a device that showcases how awesome Google Voice is, right? So what I’ve concluded is that buying an unlocked Nexus One is about the worst decision you could make for three reasons:

1. You pay more – the device costs almost $600
2. If you want to be able to use Google Voice to do everything, including voicemail, you need a contract as well.
3. Nobody seems to be able to support the unlocked version of the device and you’ll pull your hair out trying to get help.

Fixing this would be easy. Either Google or T-Mobile could simply direct people who want the unlocked device toward a plan that will actually allow someone to fully enjoy the device and provide a bit more support for those of us who want to get the device up and running quickly.

Overall, I can see the promise in this device. If you’re a power user of Google Apps, this phone is great. But I think I’ll sit this round out and wait until the support and setup issues get resolved before committing to this device.

Would welcome any thoughts in the comments. Is this something that can be chalked up to eBay’s influence, the loss of key people, or something else?

I still have a handful of GrandCentral invites available to distribute – if you’d like one, just drop me an email and I’m happy to send one your way.

***Update – Sorry, they’re all gone now.***

Grand Central has a lot of really nice and useful features for users. Instead of going into the laundry list of configurable features, I will do my best to summarize it as follows; the more of your private information you give Grand Central (your address book, for example) and the more you invest in business rules, the more you can customize the service. For my basic trial, I chose not to upload my address book (I realize this diminishes some of the functionality you can get from the CallerID and group business rules, but I generally don’t hand out my address book to any old service) and chose to go with most of the default presets. I have the service set to ring my mobile phone whenever anyone calls me on my Grand Central number and have replaced the Skype number on my email signature with my Grand Central number.

One thing I really like about Grand Central is the experience I have as a call recipient. I have my service configured to “screen all unknown callers” – this has the effect of requiring anyone who calls me to verbally identify himself/herself before I accept the call — think of it as voice caller ID. I also get to see the caller ID number as well, which is a nice touch. I also like the ability to listen in on a voicemail message as someone is leaving it and jump in and take the call if the content is interesting.

Ironically, the features that are most appealing to me as a user tend to be the ones that are most annoying to someone trying to call me. A handful of folks expressed some shock/surprise at the “voice caller ID” aspect of the service, but they were willing to play along and identify themselves. The one person whose voicemail I interrupted to take the call was mildly annoyed by the fact that I had the ability to listen in on voicemail and jump in if I found the content interesting — it basically undermined their belief that they only got my voicemail when I was in fact unavailable. I am not sure that I would make use of the ability to jump into a voicemail (as I used to be able to do with my old school answering machine) again for future calls.

Overall, I think this is a very well done service. However, there is one big gotcha — I am not really looking to hand out yet another phone number to my business associates or personal friends. This number, for my uses at least, will always occupy a second-tier status in that I feel fine freely giving it out to folks with full knowledge that it can be canceled, changed, or otherwise modified if it gets abused – I think of it as a shill for my real number. I am not sure how valuable my “second number” is or how much I would pay to keep it, but I do know that it lets me do some things that are clunky for me to do with my SkypeIn number.