I've come to love Google Voice with all its insanely cool features such as voice mail transcripting and personalized greetings. However, up until now Google Voice has required subscribers to get a new phone number to gain access to the features.

We've learned that by simply forwarding unanswered calls from your mobile to your Google Voice number, you can have Google Voice manage your voice mails. However, by doing this you are forfeiting some other features such as SMS.

Today, it's all going to change. Google is now offering the ability to keep your existing number. Hooray! I'm going to experiment with the new feature later on this afternoon. I only hope that I can now take advantage of the features I'm desperatly wanting to use.