Daily Archives:March 13th, 2009

Slip Slidin’ Away

My friend Ray Gordon recently gave me one of the most useful iTouch/iPhone hints I’ve had in some time. If you already know this, it is blindingly obvious, but if you don’t, you definitely want to!

On the iPhone keyboard, you can tap the shift key to switch to caps, and the symbol/numeric key to switch to the layout that includes commas, hypens, numbers etc. But did you know that you can touch those keys and then slide your finger to the character you want? When you release, the keyboard reverts back to the mode it was in before. So if you want, say, to insert a hyphen or an apostrophe in the middle of a word, you need just one click-and-slide, rather than three clicks.

Try it and you’ll never look back!

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The all seeing, all HEARING Google

Google have announced, but not yet launched, Google Voice, which is an expansion of the GrandCentral service they purchased a couple of years back. Think of it as a cross between your company phone exchange and Google Mail.

I have a GrandCentral account – seldom used at present, as it’s very US-centric. But it gives me one US phone number which I can choose to manage in many different ways through a convenient web interface – I can, for example, redirect it to a friend’s house if I’m staying with them, or to a softphone, or to a US mobile, or have it ring all of the above and email me a voicemail message if nobody answers any of them.

It’s a great service, and GrandCentral users have worried what would become of it since it passed into Google’s hands. So I’m pleased to hear that it’s being reborn – I hope, and expect, they will now have the resources to make it more international.

And I can’t help wondering if this might be a very key component of Android-based phones in future.

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