One of my favourite little features in iPhone 4.0 is the inclusion of Messaging.app in the Spotlight Search, which lets me call up SMS conversations with specific contacts — sometimes with as little as two taps. Setup is very simple.
Since my 10GB of music usually tend to knock other search results waaaaaay down, I set Messaging to be the top Spotlight result (Settings -> General -> Spotlight Search). This means that typing contact names into Spotlight will now show the relevant SMS conversation above everything else. It also only takes one tap on a particular result once to turn it into a Top Hit, which means it will be the first suggestion to pop up when you start typing out that string.
I text my friend “Psycho” fairly often, and simply typing “P” into Spotlight highlights him as a Top Hit. Tapping on the conversation this way is a heck of a lot faster than using his contact card, scrolling down, tapping on Text Message, and choosing whether to text his Home phone (why?!) or his cellphone. Depending on your SMS usage, using Spotlight in 4.0 for initiating texts might even be easier than loading Messaging.app manually and choosing from your “most recent” list.
This is much closer to the integration I was hoping for from the jailbreak app, Universal Search, and it’s amazing that it’s available in an upcoming official iPhone firmware.
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TAGS: iphone 4.0, Messaging, sms
