Download!Download Point responsive WP Theme for FREE!

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

10 Comments