Stick two fingers up at Android

MOBILE PHONE INNOVATOR Google has added gesture recognition to its Android operating system, which allows you to draw a letter of the alphabet in the air and a properly touchscreen enabled Android smartphone will recognise it.

According to Yang Li, a research scientist at Google who came up with the idea, the method can be used to speed up search requests.

He said that sometimes typing to get to the right search suggestion takes too long, and you might be in a quiet environment where speaking a query is not a good idea.

Gesture Search runs on Android 2.0, lets you find a contact, an installed application, a bookmark or a music track from hundreds or thousands of items, by simply drawing alphabet gestures on the touchscreen.

If you have a friend called Anne, Li said, you can open Gesture Search and draw the letter "A", and Gesture Search will return a list of items that have words starting with "A".

Of course if your handwriting is pants and your "A" looks more like an "H" it will bring up those results instead.

We are not sure if you'll actually have to press a button to switch on Gesture Search or if it would be quicker just to press another one to do a search, but won't be worrying about it.

Gesture Search improves search quality by learning from your search history, so Anne's contact info will jump to the top of the list the next time you sign "A", which would be a little disappointing if for once you wanted to know about aardvarks instead. µ