And much to nobody’s surprise, the end has come for Gizmo5, the VoIP service purchased about a year and a half ago by Google (News - Alert), which rolled the startup's engineers into its Google Voice team.

According to the Register, April 3 will be the last day for Gizmo5 (News - Alert). The service will stop, and as of Friday, March 11, “users will no longer be able to add credit to their accounts.”

According to an official statement from Google, "since the Gizmo5 team joined Google in 2009, we’ve worked together to improve the overall Google Voice experience and introduce new calling features, such as the ability to call phones from within Gmail.” The Gizmo5 discontinuance was explained as “an effort to focus our resources on core Google Voice innovations."

Yes, we’ll help you out here: According to the Register, if you use Gizmo5 and you're in the U.S., you can transfer your Gizmo5 credit to Google Voice, and it can be used for calling from either Google Voice or Gmail. Alternatively, you can request a Gizmo5 refund at http://my.gizmo5.com. If you don't have a Google Voice account, you must create one to transfer credit. If you do not request a refund or transfer by April 3, Google will attempt to automatically refund remaining call credit via your original payment method.

Got it? Good.

At the end of 2009, TMC’s Tom Keating (News - Alert) blogged that “eWeek had an interesting interview with Google's Vice President of Product Management Bradley Horowitz where Bradley said he was very enthusiastic about Google's acquisition of Gizmo5, a company that unlike Skype (News - Alert) adopted the industry SIP standard.

“Gizmo5 brings technological know-how to Google in the areas of VoIP, SIP, and termination. Further, Gizmo5 has a software client that makes Google Talk pale in comparison. I wouldn't be surprised to see Google Talk phased out in favor of the Gizmo5 client. Perhaps even Gizmo5 will be renamed Google Talk for better branding.”