The woes of Type and Go on BB10 10.1

For anyone with a BB10 device running 10.1 software, you will of course know about Type and Go. Universal search on steroids as I call it. The ability to type a few letters from any home screen and start carrying out an action from that point. For example 'tw hello' will generate a result screen offering to post a tweet saying hello. (as pictured) 'em' will offer composing an email and so on.

Now this is fantastic, and rather than opening the twitter app, pressing compose new, and then starting to type, you can just start to type. Saves a few swipes, which will be great news to those who moan about all the swiping they have to do on this new OS.

However, if you dare to venture to things like 'em dav' or 'ca dav' the results are not quite so silky smooth. Calling Dave or emailing him should be a simple command, but using Dave as an example, most will have more that one of them in their phonebook. So instead of a simple result list of the 3 Daves in your phone book, it will list them all by every email address they have combined in there. If you have the contact linked to Facebook and other contact populating apps, you could find yourself presented with 10 email addresses, over kill maybe?

The solution here would be to have to results display the actual contact, as a singular name, from which you could then decide to pick the home, work, or private email of the person, rather than listing them all at once.

It's the same with the results for calls.

The solution is really quite a simple one, and I shall explain but not before saying this.

For years now, the act of sending an email has required a few presses here and there before we are ready to compose it, that's nothing new. So it really frustrates the hell out of me when an idea is put forwards to save a few milliseconds of your day, and sadly it doesn't work as well as was hoped. STOP being so bloody lazy and just do it the old way, it's really not a big deal.

For example, to start this email, from the home screen I typed 'em', compose email popped up, selecting that the compose screen appeared with the cursor in the address field, it typed 'bl' and it auto completed blog, and I got typing. Is that really a big deal? Seriously? Still seems pretty darn convenient to me.

Once again, I am aware that the address field of the compose email screen also digs through ALL your contact lists to offer you the email addresses of your contacts. And agree this is something that needs to be allowed to be filtered from a search setting. But that said, to others it's perfect. After all BlackBerry gave BB10 Balance which if being used would not be mixing in your private Facebook contacts with you business contacts list.

Something does indeed need to be done to allow the user some control over what appears where, but for now I offer a simple work around solution.

The contacts toggle screen pictured below allows you to sort out what shows in your main contacts list, so Facebook can be filtered out for example. The only real solution I can think of at this point, a quick fix, is to filter out the rubbish from your main contacts feed. Then when calling someone it may be easier to type 'co' select contacts from the results then start typing their name from the contacts screen. Slightly longer winded but effective all the same. Sadly these filters will NOT change what appears on the main type and go screen. 

Regards

Michael

Sent from my BlackBerry Q10