Google has the availability of number porting into its phone service. In a nutshell, that means you can take your existing mobile phone number and reassign it directly to Google -- then use Google Voice to manage all of your incoming calls. It's a big change; up until now, your only option for using Google Voice was to get a brand new number assigned by the service.

(If the very notion of Google Voice itself is new to you, by the way, click over to "." It'll give you a quick primer on what Google Voice is all about and how it works.)

So -- what's involved in porting a number into Google Voice, and is it worth doing? Here are some pros and cons to help you decide.

Once you've ported your phone number into Google Voice, you have full control over where your number goes -- and you can change it anytime you want. You could have the number ring your work phone during the day and your cell phone at night; you could even have it ring three different phones at once so you can grab whichever is most convenient. And if you move or change mobile providers in the future, all you have to do is log in to your Google Voice account and update the forwarding info there; you won't have to mess with the carriers at all, and no one else will even know anything happened.