A modern gesture
In December, Google added the ability to search on Android phones using voice or even images. Now you can scribble a letter onto the touch screen and the phone will, in principle, recognise that scribble as a letter and initiate a search accordingly.
It allows for ambiguities and other gestures such as a horizontal line to erase the query. You can download it from the Android market, but this new feature seems to be restricted to phones running Android 2.0 and above and is restricted to the US for now.
The image below shows the result of an A/H input first and illustrates the ability to input subsequent letters for a more specific search.
Incidentally, siliconrepublic.com has reported Google's European boss John Herlihy as saying that the cloud will soon render desktops irrelevant in favour of mobile devices. "In three years' time, desktops will be irrelevant," told a conference. "In Japan, most research is done today on smartphones, not PCs."
While we agree that most of the growth and innovation is happening in the mobile space these days, the ergonomic advantages of having a desk-based workstation and a screen on which you can see more than a few words at a time will surely ensure the smartphone doesn't replace the PC anytime soon.
Herlihy's agenda soon became clear. "Mobile makes the world's information universally accessible. Because there's more information and because it will be hard to sift through it all, that's why search will become more and more important," he said. "This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models - ubiquity first, revenue later." The Google model.
