Nokia has released a new firmware for the N76, which I reviewed here and gave some more thoughts on. The most notable change is that this firmware adds the Active Search plugin to the Active Standby screen. I’ve seen this on both the N81 and N95 8GB, and it’s truly awesome. You simply start typing, and the app goes to work, searching the internet and your local device, letter by letter in real time. Thus, when you enter a "g", it may say there’s 15 matches in your contacts. When you press the "h" after (so you have "gh" entered), that number automatically reduces to say, 8, and so on. This way you can type your parameters until you have an acceptable number of results. VERY slick, I’m a huge fan.
Darla’s got ahold of the update, as well, but has a great question: If this can be so easily added to the phone’s firmware, what about others, such as email notifications? Take it a step further, with Nokia’s recent purchase of Navteq what about a GPS plugin on your Active Standby screen. How cool if I could tell Ovi that I like going to dive bars, and my phone would popup a notification when I come within x miles of a dive bar.
That’s right, keep thinking. It’s all possible.
