Archive for February, 2010

After almost a week on Buzz, I have to say it’s been a blast. I love peeking in on random buzzes from people living around me using Buzz’s mobile interface. Through this, I’ve been able to get to know a few other fellow Android users in the Klang Valley area. We’re now following each others’ Buzz streams.

Now perhaps, eventually, we’d get to know each other a little better and want to correspond with each other using emails. This is where I’ve stumbled upon a troublesome little catch.

When you follow a stranger’s Buzz stream, you don’t get to see his email address unless he opens it up to public view (improbable and not advisable). There doesn’t seem to be any Direct Message (ala Twitter) capabilities, so there’s no way for us to privately message each other to exchange non-public information such as email addresses. It’s rather dumb as well to ask for this information in a public Buzz message as everybody else can see it.

I can understand that Google folks may think that a DM feature may be redundant, as it duplicates what emails are supposed to achieve. But yet, this particular use case remains unfulfilled.

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I had an O2 WinMo phone once and I have to say there was one feature I really liked on it.

When I searched for a contact, all I needed to do was to hit my numpad once for each alphabet in my search string.

For example, to search for “Alan”, I’d type “2526″. It was really convenient and I missed that feature on the other phones I’ve had since then until I came across Wysie Soh’s NubDial for Android.

It’s only for Android 2.x phones right now and it’s still rather sluggish. But it’s perfectly usable and I’d recommend it to anyone.

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