Free Visual Voice-Mail For All Android Users

In effect that's what I took from today's announcement by Google.

A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required.

With Google's app for smart phones you had the ability to use Google Voice with your existing, non-Google Voice phone number.  Having Google's Android app handle all voice-mails for you cellphone is a huge convenience.  I always hated going through slow audio menus and listening to every message left until I could get to the message I was looking for.