Improvements in Navigation

There are two major improvements that, when combined, knock out points two, three, and four above.  The iPhone 3.0 software (available to all three generations of iPhones) adds Spotlight for searching which is easily accessible via two quick methods.  From the home screen, you can either click the home button once and then start typing, or you can swipe once to the right and start typing.  (If you have never played with an iPhone, the applications are stacked in a series of screens that are accessed via swiping back and forth as if you were turning pages of a book.  The Spotlight interface is located on the “left” side of the first or default page, often referred to as the home page.)  You can also tailor your search results to include only items or functions you use.  For example, I only care about finding contacts and email, and have left out items like music, podcasts, and audiobooks.

The iPhone 3GS hardware also finally added voice dialing, accessed by holding the home button for a couple of seconds.  (Note that when first released, this feature only worked via the iPhone’s built-in speaker phone.  With the recent release of the 3.1 software update, it now works via Bluetooth headsets and speaker phones, assuming they too support said feature.)  I spend a lot of time in my car and this is really the only safe way (or should I say far less dangerous way) of making a call.  Unfortunately for owners of the first two generations, this feature is tied to the hardware and not the iPhone 3.0 OS.

During my test of the iPhone 3g and iPhone 2.0 software, one of my biggest frustrations was that trying to find a particular person in my contacts took no fewer than 8 steps. The combined result of Spotlight and Voice Dialing is that I can now access my contacts in one or two clicks. Since I have about 2000 of them, that’s key.

Searching eMail

The addition of Spotlight also addresses points five and six.  In iPhone 2.0, email storage was limited to the 200 most recent messages and the only way to find older messages was to manually download more from the server in chunks of 50.  With iPhone 3.0, not only can you now search your locally stored email, you can now search the contents of your IMAP or Active Sync (e.g. Microsoft Exchange, Kerio, and Gmail) based email account on the email server itself, negating the need to store more messages locally.  Obviously your email server needs to support this function, but we have yet to run into one that doesn’t, so it’s a pretty safe bet.   Note that this feature exists only when performing a search in your mailbox, as opposed to the general Spotlight search.  To perform a search, simply scroll to the top of your mailbox and you will now see a “Search Inbox” field, allowing you to search based on the “To”, “From” and “Subject” fields.  Alas you still can’t search the body of the message, but beggars can’t be choosers, now can we?  At the bottom of your results, you will see “Continue Search on Server…” and when tapped, you will see the typical spinning gear, and then your additional results.  In our testing, we found it surprisingly fast.