Android Gesture Search: Now with more Awesome

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The day I bought my Android phone, I downloaded the Google Gesture Search app and had a lot of fun playing around with it. It was an awesome idea. Just draw characters and numbers on your screen and search from your Contacts, Browser bookmarks, Apps and Music. It seemed to work well too. But that was for the first few hours. After that I moved to the standard Contacts app and Search app for everything. There was no major issue but it just didn’t feel convenient enough and ready for full time usage. And since I have limited space on my Anroid device, I trashed it.

Yesterday, Google launched an update to the app with following 3 changes:

• Added Double Flip, a motion gesture for starting Gesture Search anytime.
• Improved usability for better accessibility support.
• Improved the performance of background tasks such as indexing.

The last 2 are subjective but it was the Double Flip that excited me to download and try again. The Double Flip gesture is really smart. Look at the demo video from Google below and you’ll see how cool and efficient it is. With a little trial and error you can set it up to work just as per your preferences. Also, it works equally well whether you hold the phone in your left or right hand. The remaining 2 updates also seem to help. As of now, all my gestures have been working perfectly, much better than before. And there is no noticeable lag as such. The background process takes 1.5-3 MB of memory in most situations so you don’t need to worry about that. Just make sure you add it to the ignore list of your favorite Task Killer app. You can also filter the search results as per your requirements. I use it only for Contacts as it works best for me.

So if you have an Android phone, download it right away. It’s one of those few apps that are useful as well as a great show-off to your friends without Android.

[via – TechCrunch]