Technomaly

There seems to be an obsession with developing new ways to search for content on your phone. There are search suggestions, voice searches, and now even gesture searches. Thanks to a new app available on the Android Market, all phones running Android 2.0 or higher are now searchable by drawing on the screen. Drawing an “A” will bring up content and contacts that start with that letter, and drawing another letter will further narrow your search. Here’s how it works according to the Google Mobile Blog:

Say you want to call your friend Anne. Just open Gesture Search and draw letter “A”, and Gesture Search returns a list of items that have words starting with “A”. If your handwriting isn’t all that neat, that’s okay. If the “A” you draw looks a bit like an “H”, as seen in the bottom left corner of the screenshot, “H” results will be brought up as well. If needed, you can also erase a query by crossing it horizontally: left to right erases the entire query, and right to left removes the last letter or space in the query. Now you can either scroll down the list to find Anne or write more letters to refine the search.

Sounds like a cool feature to me, although I’m unconvinced that it’s anything more than a neat trick at for the time being. Still, I plan on checking it out as soon as I upgrade to an Android phone. I’m still carrying around one of those early 1990’s car phones that’s attached by a phone cord to a briefcase.

Source: Google Mobile Blog Via Lifehacker