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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As we have reviewed in the past, searching for a contact throughout webOS is pretty easy to do with Universal Search, the ability to use wild cards, and using a contact’s initials to narrow down search results. However, there are times when using a person’s first initial and last name doesn’t yield the proper results. Typically, this is a result of the person’s name details (i.e. first name, middle name, last name) being incorrectly tagged in webOS, especially if their last name has a space in it. So, let’s assume you are friends with The Count from Sesame Street. You add a new contact with a name of "Count von Count". Unfortunately, while his last name is "von Count", webOS will actually assume that his middle name is "von" and last name is "Count", and may therefore not find his when you perform your contact searches. Luckily, fixing this is relatively easy and all you need to do is continue reading after the break

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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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When you are sending a text message to a person in your contact list, you normally just search for that contact in the TO field on a new SMS message (or just use Universal Search). But what happens if you want to send a message to a number not in your contact list? Or what if you are given a name or word to send the message to, but don’t have a phone dialpad in front of you to know what number each character refers to (e.g. 2 = ABC, 3 = DEF, etc). Luckily, webOS gives you the flexibility to address the message almost any way you want.

• Dial by number: If you wanted to send a message to 123456789, you can just start typing the numbers of your keyboard without the need to press the Option (Orange/Silver) key beforehand. As you can see in the top of screenshot, typing "ertdfgcvb" (the 123456789 keys on the keyboard) gives you an option to "SEND TO NUMBER".
• Dial by word: Many companies, however, will often tell you to send a text message to a word, which requires you to have a old-school telephone dialpad in front of you to know how to do that conversion. For example, Coca-cola’s MyCokeRewards tells you to text a code to "COKE" (2653). Even though the dialpad isn’t available in the Messaging App to refer to, all you need to do is just type the word in the "TO" field and the conversion is done in the "SHORT CODE" section. As you can see in the screenshot, the Short code for "ertdfgcvb" converts to 378334928.

Note that you can not mix-and-match these methods. So, if you want to send a text to 1-555-PALM-200, you will actually need to do the PALM-to-7256 conversion on your own.
 

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One of the beauties of Synergy is that webOS can take multiple entries for the same person in your contact list (regardless if the entry is from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, or your Palm Profile) and merge them all together so you don’t need to worry about finding the one right entry that has the email address or phone number you need. While webOS will automatically merge contacts based on a formula that looks for the same Name, email address or phone number, it doesn’t always work perfectly. For example, webOS may not realize that "Jon Smith" and "Jonathan Smith" are the same person, or wouldn’t know that "Jane Jones" and "Mom" should be linked together. In other cases, the way that different accounts handle middle or maiden names may cause a problem. In these situations, you may need to manually link those contacts together. Continue ready past the break to learn how

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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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Adding a new contact or adding to an existing contact is obviously an important function for a smartphone, and webOS gives you a lot of options to do just that.  The following is a long–and probably not complete–list on how you can add a new contact or add to an existing contact.  Continue reading after the break for all the details…

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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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