My first “real world” tests of TellMe for Blackberry were to find contact information for:
1) a specific Thai restaurant in Los Angeles
2) the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market
This test would pit TellMe against doing a Google search on my Curve.
TellMe Pros:
- It’s handy that you can use your voice to do searches in TellMe simply by holding down a button, without making a phone call.
- The user interface is also very fun and intuitive. The Curve often relies on the “Blackberry” button to the left of the ball for menus. Once you know that, it’s a snap to do things such as access recent results.
- TellMe has the killer feature I was hoping for: the ability to find a contact in your address book and text message the business location information to them.
Cons:
Limitations I ran into were simply that the information database isn’t broad enough.
I thought the Thai place was in West Hollywood. TellMe doesn’t seem to search in fuzzy areas around the specific city you’ve entered. It didn’t find the place (or maybe didn’t understand what I said). I searched Google under the restaurant name, West Hollywood, CA. Even though the restaurant is in “Los Angeles” the result came up immediately.
With the farmer’s market, since TellMe searches for businesses, interestingly it found the old classic “farmer’s market” on Fairfax and Third – which isn’t in Santa Monica – but didn’t find the open air market in the city of Santa Monica. Perhaps it isn’t listed as a business.
In the end it took too long to change my city, find the restaurant result, to then text it. So I copied and pasted from Google into a text message.
Still if you’re not searching in a lot of different cities, TellMe could definitely come in handy.
