What Would You Do Without Your Smartphone Keyboard?

Originally posted May 27, 2010

For those folks that made the brave leap from BlackBerry and other Smartphone devices to the iPhone upon its original release two years ago, they are already used to the concept of a virtual keyboard when typing out messages and dialing phone numbers.

However, the rest of us Smartphone users like to have a real keyboard at our fingertips. Some manufacturers have tried to soften the move from actual keypad to touch screen with the introduction of devices like the LG Xenon that has a slide out keyboard and a touch screen option.

But Google is looking to take things one step further by eliminating keyboards entirely! The release of the Nexus One, has allowed users in the US to start to experiment with what Google hopes is the future of mobile search: voice- and picture-based searching.

The idea behind this is that users can simply speak a phrase into their phone and generate a search engine result, in the same manner as we currently type into Google. The other option is to take a picture of something, such as a specific landmark, and have results and information returned simply by submitting the picture. Pretty handy if you don't know what you are looking at!

These ideas are still in early development and aren't very reliable just yet. Currently, voice searching works well with short strings of words only, but even one misplaced word doesn't throw off your search entirely which is a good thing - somewhat like when you make a typo in the search engine on your computer. Google Goggles is the new visual searching application that is being tested - also hit and miss at present though. This allows you to take a picture of something where the image is then scanned with "recognizers" for text and familiar visuals in Google's databases.

Although these are still early days, testers are hopeful that something like this will take off, and may even lead to facial recognition technology. However, Google doesn't want to approach that end at all, as there just aren't any valid reasons as to why someone would need that.

Voice- and picture-based searching can eventually lead the way to future features like:

• The ability to photograph a printed page so it can be scanned into text and quickly translated into another language
• The ability for travelers to speak a phrase into a phone, have it translated into another language and played back through their phone's speaker

As always, some exciting things to look forward to in the world of wireless!