Google has released an update to their Google Mobile App for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and it adds an amazingly accurate voice search capability to your mobile device of choice.

All you have to do is put the phone to your ear, after you hear a beep you clearly say what you’re looking for, then you’ll hear another beep. In a few seconds you’ll have your search results.

I tried it for a post on Apple Gazette earlier today and it was correct 9 out of 10 times - which isn’t bad at all. I even tried to throw it off with words like “Godzilla”, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and “William Shakespeare”.

Each time the App came through and worked like a charm.

If you haven’t tried it yet, you can get it right here for free.

I like the Market Felt font in the iPhone and iPod touch’s “Notes” app - but if you’re not a fan, there is a way to change it to the more serious Helvetica font.

1) The first thing you need to do is go to Settings> General> Keyboard> International Keyboards.

2) Next select the Japanese keyboard and enable the QWERTY keyboard

3) Now open Notes and begin typing a message.

4) Click the Globe icon next to the Space Bar to switch to Japanese and type a character. This will change your font from Market Felt to Helvetica

After you have done this, the font will not change back.

via macosxhints

Among the myriad of fixes that have come with the iPhone 2.1 software update, a nice little feature has been added to the headphones as well.

You can Use the iPhone headphones, or any other third-party headphones that have the click-control on them to jump back one song in your playlist. All you have to do is triple-click the controller and it will jump back to the previous song you were listening to.

So now you can -
click once - to pause
click twice - to move ahead one song
click thrice - to move back one song

You must do these actions quickly or they won’t take.

Thanks to Steve for sending this in.

With the release of Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, it has become easier than ever to download content directly onto your iPod or iPhone. In fact, it is so easy to download content from the iTunes App Store - and there is so much content to choose from - that you may find yourself only wanting certain applications on your mobile device at at time.

Remember, though, if you delete on your iPhone or iPod Touch that hasn’t been backed up on your Mac or PC and it’s gone…unless you want to pay for it again. (Actually iTunes will remember your purchases so you can download them again at no charge)

but, there is a quick and easy way to transfer your purchased and downloaded applications to iTunes.

1) First you need to connect your iPhone/iPod Touch to your computer.

2) When iTunes launches you need to make sure your computer is authorized for your iPhone/iPod Touch. To do this go to STORE>Authorize computer… and enter your username and password

3) To transfer your applications to iTunes make sure you have selected your device from the Devices tab, then select FILE>”Transfer purchases from [your device]”

Your iPhone/iPod Touch will sync with iTunes and add all of your downloaded applications into the Applications section of your Library.

The Associated Press recently launched an iPhone-friendly web application containing all their news articles in an attractive and convenient format. They join many other web sites to create Mobile Safari editions of their services, and offer some excellent features.

To access the Associated Press iPhone view, visit apnews.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch. The site features categorized headlines, a powerful search tool, local news, categories, and intelligent customization settings. The site fits the iPhone user interface excellently and is probably the best implementation I have seen for a news application.

Gizmodo recently posted out that keyboard localization and accents in SMS messages can lead to bloodbaths, so I figured it would be useful to point out how easy it is to put accents over letters on the iPhone; maybe it will save some lives.

The default view when the iPhone keyboard pops up on your screen shows a QWERTY keyboard, a shift key, a space bar, a delete key, a return key, and a button at the bottom-left that sends you off to find more symbols to type. All these buttons, yet there are no dedicated ones for accents. However, typing accents is quite possible. To add an accent to a letter, hold your finger over any key that permits accents and wait about one second. The button expands and a menu pops up above it with keys for any possible accents! Now just drag your finger to the accent you are looking for and let go, and the accented letter will appear.

To insert accents over capital letters, do the exact same thing except press the shift key before entering the accented letter.

Furthermore, This feature does not only apply to letters, but also to some symbols. In the “.?123″ symbols and numbers view, exclamation points and question marks can be flipped upside down by using this trick.

Inserting accented characters is a really well thought-out feature of the iPhone keyboard and should actually be expanded. For example, Apple could add “sub-keys” to the number keys on the numbers and symbols page of the keyboard that correspond to the symbols inserted when one holds shift and presses on them on a standard QWERTY keyboard on their computer.

Although this would be less useful on an iPod Touch which does not have the iPhone’s SMS capabilities, I assume it is available on iPod Touches as well. If anyone could confirm this in the comments, that would be great!

The iPhone’s video sub-application (it is technically part of the iPod application) contains everything you’d expect from a solid video player. By tapping on the screen, you get a pop-up on the bottom and top of the screen that allows you to pause, play, fast-forward, or rewind the video, to adjust the volume, to change how far into the video you are, to adjust the aspect ratio, and to close the video. These are really the standard features that just about every video player has (except maybe the the aspect ratio), but there are some more lesser known tricks hidden within the video player.

One of these features is the ability to play a video forward in slow motion. To do this, pause the video and then press down on and hold onto the fast-forward button. This will play the video in slow motion, and even includes the slowed down sound. Oddly, I could not find any way to play a video in slow motion in reverse.

Like most non-phone-related iPhone features, I assume this works on the iPod Touch, but if anyone could confirm that, it would be great.

Of course the one night I leave my car unlocked, some punk kid steals my iPod. I call the police to file a report and they ask for a serial number. “It’s on the back of the iPod, I didn’t write it down,” I tell the officer.

No matter what I say, he wants a serial number. I tell him I’ll call him back when I can find it. So off I go to find the box it came in. Since I have two iPod’s, it only makes sense with the kind of day I’m having that I can only find the serial number to the iPod that wasn’t stolen. Back to square one.

Ok, enough of my complaining, you just want to find your serial number! Here are a few quick and easy steps to find the serial number to your lost or stole iPod.

The information we need is located in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iPod.plist

To open that file we can use a plist editor or just use the Terminal. If you’ve never used Terminal, beware of commands that begin with “sudo”. Other than that, have fun.

The command to pull out our serial numbers is:

defaults read com.apple.iPod | grep Serial

This will read the plist and display just the serial numbers. Pretty slick ‘eh?

Check out our other iPod Tips.

A couple weeks ago, my iPhone firmware somehow got corrupted and iTunes instructed me to restore it in order for it to work again. I took iTunes’ advice and restored the iPhone, but my iPhone still didn’t seem to work. It entered a strange mode where all I could see was a black screen with the Apple logo and a spinning “loading” circle.

A few days later, I went to the Apple Store and discovered that my iPhone’s problem was actually pretty obvious. Each time I restored the iPhone, iTunes asked me if I wanted to retrieve my data from a backup, and I agreed. The problem with this is that iTunes actually backed up the corrupted version on the iPhone, so each time I restored from the backup, I re-corrupted the iPhone!

I find it perfectly logical that Apple would offer to restore my iPhone, but I do not find it very logical that Apple wouldn’t warn me before backing up a corrupted iPhone.

I have always found the little button and microphone included on my iPhone headphones a really useful and thoughtful feature. I’ve always known that while listening to music the button could be used for pausing and playing the music, and pressing the button with a call coming in would answer the phone. However, while using my iPhone’s iPod feature more than ever while on “vacation” in Israel this week, I discovered even more use from the little button.

While listening to music, pressing the little headphone button two times in rapid succession skips to the next track!

I admit that this tip is very basic and many of you probably know about it already, but it definitely boosted my “iPod productivity” significantly ever since I started using it.

I think that this feature should work on all recent iPods, but I don’t believe any other ones come with the same button or even a similar one. (Please correct me if I’m wrong about that.)