For those less utilitarian and more flamboyant, Google have exposed a visual tweaks settings called "Bells and Whistles". You can style your Google Mobile App in any shade: red, taupe, or even heliotrope but i find this kinda boring as it only changes the colour, nothing fancyful. If you're on a faster iPhone, like the iPhone 3GS, you may want to try the live waveform setting which turns on, as the name suggests, a moving waveform when you search by voice.
The accuracy of the voice search aren't 100% right all the time, Google might want to consider acquiring Dragon for voice dictation? Anyway searching by voice could be improved by selecting your spoken language or accent, although the list is not very comprehensive, i assume more will come forth later on in the updates.
Clicking on the left side of the search bar, you can bring up a search menu which lets you select from "iPhone and Web, Maps, Images, News and Wikipedia". This function i believe is worth mentioning as it aren't obvious.
A list of useful Web Apps are also present in the App's Dock, examples are Gmail, Calendar, Docs etc. Unlike the search results, this Web Apps opens out in Safari Browser instead of in the app itself. To overcome this, you could simply search Gmail and open it from the in app browser. Although i would just create a bookmark on the Springboard and check my email faster that way.
All in all, i believe this Google Mobile Map has come a long way and i would recommend it for faster searching on the go. If you haven got it on your device, its time to check it out on iTunes Google Mobile App and did i said it was FREE?
Note: Voice Search works on iPhones only.
No comments:
Post a Comment