If yesterday’s Nokia/Nuance post has you hankering for voice activated searching via your S60 Nokia, take a look at Yahoo’s oneSearch.
The latest version of the mobile search app will sit at the botom of your Today screen waiting for you to tap the ‘Pencil’ button to start searching. Searches can be entered via the keypad, but if you hold down the green button you can speak your brains into the phone and oneSearch will do its level best to work out what you mean.
Searches are all done via the Yahoo! search engine, and there doesn’t seem to be a way of telling it to use a different browser (e.g. Opera) but the voice recognition is pretty decent for a mere 248k download.
Without pausing for breath following Nokia’s announcement last week that they are integrating Google into Nokia Search, Google have released a native S60 client that could see them getting a crucial one-click headstart on their rivals.
The app sits on the standby screen activated by the ‘Pencil’ key on most Nokia mobiles, and will pop up a search bar that will send your search terms to Google via the phone’s web browser.
Browser esults are opened in the newly-revamped mobile versionof Google’s search engine that should be clearer to read on small screens than the main site.
It’s been a long time coming, but Nokia has finally given in and added Google to Nokia Search.
Google joins Yahoo! and Microsoft Live in the app’s list of search options. Nokia plan to roll out the changes in the Nokia N96, N78, 6210 Navigator, and 6220 phones initially although there are plans to release firmware updates to some older handsets later in the year.
Although this is undeniably great news (personally, I never use Nokia Search for precisely this reason) you have to wonder - why now? Could Nokia be trying to prepare for the release of Google’s Android by which presumably will tightly integrate with its parent company’s search engine?
