So, the official mobile telephone and Internet platform of Heathen HQ is the iPhone. It’s fantastic. I’ve used WinMo and Palm and Blackberry, and none of them have the total package of capability + usability the iPhone brings. I’m sore about the walled-garden aspects, but I’m also reasonably confident that as Android spools up, that’ll stop being quite such an issue.

Anyway, one aspect of the iPhone that was vexing out of the gate was the lack of any contact search. If you’re a hipster kid with 100 friends, this is a non-issue, but I have 710 contacts in my address book, and this is AFTER I did a huge cull last year. Scrolling by letter was painful.

The 2.0 update gave us a search option, but its implementation was sub-optimal; there’s a search box, but you have to scroll all the way to the top of the address book list to get to it. A better option would have been to keep the search box on the screen at all times, so it’s always accessible. (This is one area where the Blackberry is definitely superior; on a BB, you can pretty much start typing a name from anywhere and have it do a live search for you, but never mind that.)

Anyway, someone’s found a way to at least sort of solve the problem, and in a way I would’ve laughed at if I hadn’t tried it first: the Melodis Voice Dialer is a thing of beauty, and more or less Just Works. Even better: it’s FREE. I just downloaded it today, so it hasn’t had heavy use or anything yet, but my gut is that it’s gonna be a winner.