It's still got a ways to go before it's as powerful as Spotlight on your Mac, but the new device-wide search added to iPhone OS 3.0 makes quick work of locating email, contact info, calendar appointments, apps, and more.
We never thought we’d say this, but now that Spotlight search is part of the iPhone OS, we actually prefer checking email on our iPhone to checking it on our Mac. Not that Spotlight’s usefulness ends with Mail, of course. By sliding left from your first home screen, or tapping the tiny magnifying glass icon to the far left of the dots at the bottom of any home screen, you bring up the Spotlight window. Typing a term into the field sends your iPhone scouring all its contents for instances of that word--in Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Notes, your iPod library, and, of course, Apps. (For more on enhanced search and other features in iPod mode, see “King of the iPods,” below.)
Can't find an email by scrolling? Use Mail's Search function instead.
To access items shown in the search results--read an email, launch an app, or play an audio or video track--just tap it. For people with enough apps on their iPhones to fill up nine or more home screens with icons, Spotlight is a way faster way to find an app that’s on your eleventh home screen. So instead of swiping 11 times then tapping an app’s icon, just launch Spotlight, type in the first couple letters of the app’s name, and there you are. You just saved yourself 3 seconds! If you really want to shave seconds off searches--and especially if your large fingers have a hard time tapping the teeny-tiny magnifying glass on the home screen, or swiping left through screen after screen makes you dizzy--you can set the phone so double-clicking the Home button opens Spotlight: Choose Settings > General > Home > Search.
If you don't find the email you're looking for among downloaded messages, tap Continue Search On Server.
Back to Mail for a moment, there’s also a separate search feature within Mail that lets you refine your results by narrowing which part of the email it searches: sender, recipient, subject line, or the entire message. You also get the option to search messages that are still on your email server. Of course, if you want to search across more than one email account at once, the solution is to use Spotlight. Any results that are found in emails will appear in a list next to the Mail icon. When you tap the result, you’ll see which account it belongs to by tapping the left-facing arrow to go back to the inbox. It’s too bad the results list can’t display this detail for you, but we can also imagine how cluttered it could make the list.
Finding apps, emails, and notes with the same keyword or letter combo is so cinchy now. Thanks, Spotlight!
