Google Unveils Gesture Search for Android
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Smartphones, if anything, are the embodiment of convenience and on-the-go computing. This mobile phone segment has an entire industry of apps meant for productivity on the road offering lighter iterations of desktop functions and a wide selection of hardware enhancements to supplement each one. And being one of the latest imports to the mobile computing space, Google has been in the works to maximize every facet of the mobile computing space. A logical avenue for Google to explore is mobile search, and what better way to maximize its usage than to leverage the smartphone’s touchscreen technology.
Not one to just let their products go out and pasture by themselves, Google has unveiled Gesture Search, a new search feature for mobile devices running Google’s Android mobile operating system. Unveiled this week through the Google Mobile Blog, Gesture Search lets you quickly find a contact, an installed application, a bookmark or a music track from hundreds or thousands of items, by simply drawing alphabet gestures on the touch screen with your fingers or with a stylus.
As you can see from the screenshots, Gesture Search returns a list of items that have words starting with whatever letter you draw onscreen; adding a second letter further refines the search. But not to worry if you’re cursive handwriting isn’t all that neat, according to Google research scientist Yang Li who posted the announcement on the Google Mobile Blog, “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.”
Gesture Search for Android is, of course, yet another product borne out of the Google Labs, and would work for Android 2.0 (also known as Éclair) or above in the US. This follows the launch of other search capabilities such as search by voice in December last year and search by location in January.
And in a lighter, marginally related Google news, Topeka, Kansas mayor William W. Bunten has changed his city’s name to Google. The decision, as you can see from the official city document here, was made with a proclamation signed at a city council meeting where the mayor declared the name change to last for the entire month of March.
The name change was prompted on behalf of the city’s bid to be the pilot site for Google’s recently announced broadband experiment which aims to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the US. The experiment, called “Fiber for Communities,” instructed city officials to nominate their own cities where Google will handpick from the nominated areas a few places best suited for the experiment.
The idea first came up as a suggested experiment on ThinkBigTopeka, a site aimed to jumpstart the nomination of the city and to use social media to show support. Aside from the name change, the official document also dubbed Topeka with the tagline “The capital city of fiber optics” and has set up shop online with a Facebook group page which currently has 14,046 members, a Twitter profile and a YouTube page to spread the word
According to The Topeka Capital-Journal, this is not the first time the city has temporarily changed its name. Former mayor Joan Wagnon in 1998 issued a proclamation to change the city’s name from Topeka to ToPikachu to recognize the nationwide kickoff of the Pokemon franchise held in their city.
If Topeka can undergo a name change for a Japanese franchise of games and animated movies and TV programs, it can certainly go through that again if it meant a further improvement of the city-wide Internet connectivity which gives it a distinct potential of becoming the technology hub of the South.
It can be remembered that the original announcement for the project stated a promise of delivering fiber optic Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,500 people.
Whether Google’s (the city) will have any actual bearings on Google’s (the Internet company) decision-making process or not, it remains to be seen. It has, however, managed to capture Google and everyone else’s attention.
Image credits: www.thinkbigtopeka.com
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RSpears @ March 17, 2010
