Friday, October 22, 2010

Phone Friday: Two magical tips for the G2

Remote Copy and Paste

As if you needed another reason to love AppBrain, here is one. Check out this innocuous little text box in the right hand corner of the My Apps page labeled Enter a URL or text to send to your phone :

It does exactly what you'd hope it would do. Write some text in there, click the button, and poof, the text is now ready to be pasted on your mobile device. Enter a URL and magically the web browser on your phone opens with it.

This remote control functionality seems like it has huge possibilities. For now at least, it makes sharing a URL or text between your laptop and phone a breeze.

Seriously, it feels like magic.

Give Voice A Chance

One of the advantages of spending time with the myTouch is that it forced me to experience life without a hardware keyboard. I didn't much like it, but I got to learn about Swype (among the most impressive software I've ever encountered) and equally important, how voice dialing could be used to efficiently access the phone book.

The G2's voice functionality comes built in with even more functionality. Go ahead and try holding down the magnifying glass button (the one visible when the keyboard is folded up) - after a few moments a Google Voice Actions prompt will pop up. It's worth taking a few minutes and watching the help video they provide.

The cool part about using Google Voice Actions is that the phone will parse and automatically execute requests. For example, you can say: "Call Ben Simon at Work" and the phone will just do this.

The complete list of actions you can take are here. Among my favorites is the Note to self and the Listen to functionality. The note to self will take the text you say and convert it to an e-mail to yourself. Essentially, this is a voice drivenjotter app. The listen to functionality did more than I thought it would - it actually parsed the artist and then setup a new Pandora station for me. Without spending any money, I was able to mention a song and a few moments later have it start playing.

When the voice recognition works (which for me seems like 90%+ percent of the time), the system is nothing short of magic.

2 comments:

  1. have you tried Chrome to Phone? does the same. there are plugins for both Chrome and Firefox that had buttons to your browser that allow you to send any page to your phone for browsing.

    And yes the voice recognition has been great on the G2.

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  2. Thanks for the Chrome to Phone tip -- I'll have to give it a shot.

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