“Yeah I don’t feel like scrolling down my contact list, I just want to scribble a letter and let the phone do the rest”. I guess that was the original idea when they’ve started developing the Android gesture search.
And the functionality is as simple as that, just scribble a letter in your Google phone and Android will recognize the letter as an input, and you’ll get the result. Here’s a little sample:
This feature will be available on Android 2.0 or higher. And the gesture search will work not only with contacts, but you can find applications, bookmarks, music, etc.
Also the system has some interesting features:
- If you type a letter that looks like a different letter, the search result will consider both possible letters.
- The system is prepared to learn from every time you search, and your selection will appear jump to the top of the list the next time you try the same search.
Over a year after a third-party app was released for Yammer users with an Android, Yammer have decided it’s time to release their own official app to compliment their service which enables people working within a company or group to send updates as to what they’re doing which is fed into a constant stream, like Twitter.
The app can be ran in the background while you use the phone on a day to day basis. It will vibrate or make a noise when the stream is updated by a colleague answering the boilerplate Yammer question, ‘What are you doing?’
The pre-release version is still reported to contain many bugs and I doubt it will be ready until late Spring of next year.
I think that this app will make switching from the iPhone to cheaper android devices much easier. Many people depend on Apple’s device purely because of the apps – now with many alternatives in the hands of the competitors, the iPhone could be in trouble. Expect a price drop in early 2010.
Google Labs, as we said it many times, represent’s Google’s sandbox where they can try a lot of new technologies, and also sharing them with the globe. And if we talk about Google and new technologies we can always be amazed, and I guess this one it’s not the exception: Google Listen will provide audio search within th web, but wait, it is only available for Android (just for now I hope).
You can search, subscribe, download and strem podcasts and audio around the web. Interesting thing about this Android’s app: by subscribing to programs you will create a personalized audio-magazine.You can download Google Listen for your Adroid device from here.
You can see it like this:
Google Listen Home Page
The audio search is only available in English. And remember, this app belongs to Google Labs, so you should expect some bugs or lack of stability.
Also I’ve noticed that the Google Listen home page hasn’t been all that “available” in the last few days.
