5320's handy search

And here's another bit of the 5320's review.

Last night, I discovered that my phone is actually pretty nifty when it comes to searching for files and folders. And for free, too! Click on the post to read more.



The main screen (aka the desktop) features a search function (depends whether you have the Active Standby feature turned on or not; in my case it was turned on). When you click it, you're presented with the default internet search options (I had Google set as the default), and sub sections such as Messages, Contacts, Calendar, Music, Music, Email Messages, Bookmarks (which seemed to search web history instead), Images, Videos, Landmarks, Applications and Notes. Optionally, you can turn on the option for the phone to search in your Files as well.

In the search box provided, as soon as you begin typing something, the phone starts searching. If you enter a part of a phone number, it starts searching numbers throughout all phone locations, including contacts, and brings you a list of matches (if a few matches are provided), or lets you know how many contacts it's found, or messages and so on and so forth.

For instance, if I want to quickly dial my father's number, all I have to do is enter the name associated with his number, and wait for the results to show up (which take a few seconds), and press the Call key. The phone begins calling. I can view other files, videos, navigate through songs and well - pretty much everything on my phone via the search feature.

The only downside of the search feature is that it takes a few seconds to show up some results, but that's probably because it doesn't pre-index the files, unlike other programs available for the S60 platform (such as SkyeQuicKey or T9 Nav). One major drawback of these two S60-based programs that I saw were (apart from the fact that they're not for free):

SkyQuicKey didn't allow me to enter service commands easily (for instance, *444# for checking my account balance - it would always end up showing 444 instead, and never dial the correct syntax)
T9 Nav - when listening to the music player, it would interfere because the keypad tones would stop the audio from being relayed (while the music player was continuously counting the seconds). Not sure whether it's been fixed in the newer versions, or whether it's phone-specific or not.

And the searching doesn't end here - when composing messages, I can type the person's name and let the phone recognize (or give me results if multiple searches show up) within a seconds. Convenience, indeed, because the other method of opening the list and marking each name was just awfully long. This is relatively quicker, even for multiple recipients being keyed in one-by-one.

I like! I really like this feature. And I don't see any reason why others shouldn't.