Damnit! Where Is My Google Instant Mobile?
One of the perks in owning a Nexus One is that you are first in line to get the latest and hottest updates well before everyone else. It’s the Google developer phone. Not saying I’m a developer but that’s what they call it in Viva Nexus One! with developer accounts.
I’m sure you’ve heard of Google Instant by now and if you’re one of those people who searches by going to google.com rather than your address or search bar maybe you liked it enough not to disable it. For our Bing audience, basically it starts performing searches upon each keystroke, often presenting what you want well before you’d otherwise finish typing, saving you on average nine seconds.
They started rolling it out to Android phones Monday. So just to see if the lag was tolerable to conclude whether or not this would be a hit, I fired up my browser on my Nexus One, Froyo, went to Google, no sign of Instant. Spent some time hunting for it, other blogs, going into settings, adding and changing search widgets, getting really angry and disoriented that here I am, a Nexus One owner, and I’m not first in line for something from Google? Carrier-tied phones with Eclair are getting this ahead of me? Seriously?
I was so winded that I went on IRC to check with the kind of people who go on IRC to see if any of my Nexus brethren had it yet. None were present so a light went off in my head that I could blog about it both to vent and to ask our Android readers who’s got Google Instant yet and on which phone/carrier/release and if it’s cool or if it’s whack. It’s supposed to look like this, think you might have to hit something to turn it on:
Please, someone tell me this is a super slow trickle rollout that has in fact hit Nexuses at least proportionately to other top shelf devices.
While I’ve got your attention, got another question to throw out to you whether you’re Google to the bone or not: How come all mobile firmware updates all seem to trickle out so slowly? As in weeks. Is it because they want to give themselves a chance to fix something before two hundred thousand people are complaining about something? Bandwidth considerations maybe? Anyone mad about something else, like me for posting this? If you fit into that category, as a gesture I offer you a Firefox plugin that lets you use Google Instant searches in new blank tabs.
Doug Simmons
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Doug Simmons
Biographical info.. hmm. I have a history of not being able to strike the balance between what is "safe" to put into these forms and what is, in my mind at least, funny. Can't do it.
grrr
Wrong Doug. The other Doug and him with good reason (adsense). Though for the record I’d bet I know much more about Google’s TOS, specifically the parts about excessive swearing and other objectionable content, to operate profanely but snugly within the boundaries of not fucking our revenue stream up.
That said, I must assume Smith has no idea and therefore presumes that not discouraging swearing among the writers is the way to go whereas telling them to have fun while using some discretion and restraint is not so I operate under what I perceive to be his obscenity sensitivity threshold, not Google’s.
Though I was pushing it with the goat picture, however subtle. Glad you spotted it.
Oh. Yeah. Yeah I hate that word. In fact right now I cannot come up with a word or short phrase I hate more than that word, except maybe per se which I think is overused. I wish someone would make it go away.
Oh wait, I can do that myself right here with a little php magic! Substitute open and customizable for each instance.
from your phone go to this url and tell me if it works: http://tinyurl.com/lkhzfo
@Doug Simmons: ok fair response, but did that work? I presume it did, right?:) I mean, not for Goog search but Bing Live Search but that’s sweet, right? It’s all the gooness of live search without Goog. I thought you’d love it
sounds like more fragmentation to me 🙂
@Abe: Simmons doesn’t like when people use the ‘f’ word on this site 😉
@Doug Simmons: I was referring to the word ‘fragmentation’ that Abe dropped- I don’t give an F about the other F word 🙂
Ok sorry doug but i must chukle a bit. If i go to google.com on my phone and start typing something in the search bar a bunch of results start showing up under the bar. And they change as i keep typing. My captivate running eclair is doing this. I think it always has or did it start with the update we got a month ago? I chukle cuz im still waiting for froyo and you already have it so :)~
so to answer your request: stock att captivate updated
By results showing up do you mean auto suggestions drop down or do you mean full google search page results which change as you type like in the video?