If you're not familiar with the idea of a unified inbox, it's pretty simple. On one hand...you give your callers a single number, and it follows you around... ringing whatever other phones you program. On the other hand... it consolidates all your messaging (Voice, Fax, Email, RSS, text messaging, other I can't remember) into one centralized place (the "Unified" in-box).
Getting to that one-stop shop is tougher, but once you get your old-fashioned analog
voice messages converted to the digital world, great things can happen. For instance - your unified inbox could take a voice message from someone, convert it to text, and send it back to your phone as a short text message - something you could respond to even if you were in the
middle of an important meeting. Or....by going the other way... text-to-speech... it could "read" you your email over the phone. Faxes,voice mail, e-mail, short-message-service and other stuff that might be coming down the pike can all be handled the same way.
But why is Google's entry into unified inbox such a big deal? Because Google is building a system that can organize and manage information unlike anything else in human history. (At least, near-earth history that we know about.) When you couple a unified inbox with Google's remarkable tagging system (in-use with GoogleNotebook and GoogleBookmarks), Google's document management system, Google's eMail system, and their massive search capability...the capability is staggering, and I think they're just getting started.
