Before Palm officially puts the final nail in the Universal Search coffin (to be replaced with Just Type in webOS 2.0), we figured that now is probably the best time to bring Universal Search to our Tip Roundup. Everyone using a webOS device should be familiar with Universal Search, as it allows you to search for contacts, apps, Google, maps, websites and so much more from anywhere on the device. If you are not familiar with Universal Search, all you need to do it just type while in either card view or in the launcher, and webOS will display the results right on the screen, to be accessed with a single tap. Keep reading after the break to learn what Universal Search is capable of, along with some additional tips to get the most out of your search.

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Note that this only works on webOS 1.4.5 and below. This functionality appears to be disabled in webOS 2.0 and above

While searching for contacts in webOS is already an easy task using Universal Search and searching by a contact’s initials, it can get even easier by using a wildcard in your search. By substituting one or more "%" in the beginning or middle of a search as a wildcard, you can perform even more complex searches. For example, searching for "w%os" finds "WebOS Internals", but also other contacts with a "w" and then an "os" later in the name. And just as Universal Search looks in a person’s nickname and company name, these wildcards can also be used to search those, so searching for "%Experts" would return anyone with "Smartphone Experts" as their company. Unfortunately, it only appears to search for contacts within Universal Search, and not apps, but this functionality is usually somewhat consistent across the rest of webOS. Keep reading after the break to see how this differs in various areas of the OS.

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It looks like Google will continue its long history of "forgetting" about the existence of webOS by enabling Google Instant on Android and iOS 4 devices (only in Safari) but not webOS. The new feature can be turned on with a link on those devices… a link that is nowhere to be found anywhere on the Google page or in the settings page when you open it on your webOS device.

For those of you not familiar with Google Instant, Google display results for you as you are typing. As if scouring the web with the press of the enter key was not fast enough, now you do not even have to type your whole search query before seeing results.

On the bright side, we suppose, Google Instant is practically useless on an iOS device, because as you can see in the image above, you cannot see any of the instant results until you get rid of the keyboard. Therefore you end up with the same number of clicks you had before. I suspect the result would be the same on any device with an on screen keyboard, although it does look pretty slick in Google’s demo, which you can watch after the break.

Google Suggest does work on webOS devices and has for several months now. When I tested Google on my Pre, it remembered my search history from my computer. It had search queries in the list that I had just searched on my computer only a couple minutes before.

Because we have Universal Search, and Google Suggest works so well on webOS (and it’s integrated into Just Type in webOS 2.0), it seems the webOS community is not missing much. Still, let us hope that at some point in the future, Google will stop snubbing its customers who use devices that Google deems unworthy.

Source: Google; Via: Engadget

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Welcome to Round Table, which is in fact not a table at all. Round Table is a continuing series on PreCentral where we pose a question to the staff and they provide their thoughts and insights. The question could be something simple like “what’s your favorite use for the Pre’s mirror?” or something a bit more complicated, like “why are you sticking with webOS (or are you)?” Or maybe we’ll just end up discussing our sandwich workflow. Today, however, we’re diving into the latest version of webOS. While few have been able to handle webOS 2.0, the veritable cornucopia of videos, screenshots, and reviews have made it easy to draw some preliminary conclusions. After the break, see what the crew has to say about HP webOS 2.0.

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While you can perform a quick search of Google or Wikipedia directly from Universal Search, the web browser has a mini-version of Universal Search built in that allows for a similar action. From anywhere on a website within the browser card, you can just start typing on the keyboard to bring up a search bar on the top of the screen. There are 4 search options that you can take advantage of once you start typing:

1. If you enter in an actual web address URL and press either the Enter key () or the Arrow icon () on the screen, the browser will load up that website.
2. If you enter a search term (as opposed to a URL), you can either press the Enter key () or you can tap on the top row labeled "Google" to initiate a Google Search.
3. If you tap on the Wikipedia row, you will initiate a search of the mobile Wikipedia site
4. In the final area, you will see any of your browser bookmarks followed by your browser viewing history that matches against your search. You will see any website with that search in the URL address or website name, sorted in the order of the most recently visited site. You can drag the search menu up to reveal additional history items

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Whenever you are searching for a contact within webOS, be it via Universal Search, within the Contact App, while addressing a new email or text message, or when on a Contact picker screen within an app, the easiest and fastest way to find that person is by using their initials. While you can search by using only the first or last name, your best method is by using the "First Initial + Last Name" method that has been around since PalmOS. So, in the screenshot to the right, you can see that you can find Jon Rubinstien by typing "jrubinstien" (actually, you do not need to type in the entire search term, just the first few characters).

Note: Contact Search will look through all the Linked Contacts for a given contact, not just the Primary Profile. So, if you have a contact that has a linked listing from Facebook, Google Contacts and your Palm Profile, webOS will look through the names listed for all 3 of those in the search, but will still only return the single linked contact. Some accounts like Facebook sometimes treat middle and last names a bit oddly which can affect your search results. Here is a good forum post on one way to combat this behavior.

Thanks to alexhaefner for suggesting this tip

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Trying to find a single email if you have a large number of messages in your inbox or any specific folder can be a tough task if you just try scrolling through all your emails. You are able to sort your email folders in webOS, but that is also not the most efficient way to find that one email. Instead, Palm built in a way to search your emails by "just typing", similar to how the memo search functionality works (which is also absent from a direct search in Universal Search). Unfortunately, there are a few limitations with this functionality, as listed after the break:

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While the stock Memo app may not be as fully featured as some third-party apps and may even lack some features of the old PalmOS Memo Pad, the ability to search your Memos does help to minimize some of the heartache associated with using the app. All you need to do is open up the Memo App and start typing, and the app will look for any reference of that search term within any of your existing memos. As you can see by the example to the right that shows a search for "webos", it returns 3 memos even though the search term is not visible within the onscreen "preview" of the memo.  A few notes of this functionality:

• Unfortunately, this is not built in to Universal Search, so you will need to open the Memo app first
• Although capitalization is not factored in, the search function looks for an exact match of your input.  Therefore, a search for "Palm webOS" and "webOS Palm" are not the same thing
• This can be a potential solution for those who miss the ability to put memos in "categories." Going forward, simply include the category name anywhere within the memo and then use the search functionality to limit a specific category of memos.

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As we discussed in prior tips, Universal search is an extremely powerful tool that lets you search for your Contacts, Applications, the web and Google Maps from anywhere on your phone and in a matter of seconds. For those Homebrewers out there, there are also a wide-range of patches that are available to further enhance Universal Search. After the break, we will dive into some of the more popular Universal Search patches that are available to you via webOS Quick Install or Preware.

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I just tested a review copy of Mezzoman (available in the App Catalog), which is designed to help two (or three) people "meet in the middle."On the whole, it seems to be a simple and useful app, although it has some limitations that are worth knowing about.

The essence of Mezzoman is very simple: the user puts in his own address (or uses current GPS coordinates, requiring location services to be turned on), and one or two (for the paid version) other addresses, enters a search term (I tried two searches, "kosher" and "bowling," since the program is not limited to food genres), selects a search results radius (apparently in miles, although it does not specify units), chooses from either review site Yelp or Google as a search tool, and hits the big "Mezzoman Go!" button at the bottom of the screen. The Mezzoman client will search for businesses meeting the search criteria in the radius around the midpoint between the two addresses.

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