Mobile Phone News:

A new app has been released for the iPhone, courtesy of Google. Now, normally, I wouldn’t bother doing coverage of iPhone apps on the blog, but there’re two important reasons why I’ve picked up on this today:

1/ It allows you to do a Google voice search, simply saying what you want into the phone, and it searches for it.

2/ It doesn’t work properly if you don’t use an American accent.

Er, what?

Yes, according to The Register, the Google app doesn’t appear to work very well with an accent that doesn’t have an American twang to it, or as we call it in Britain, an English Accent. Or Scottish, come to that. Or Welsh. Or any of the scores of accents found throughout these sceptred isles, including Scouse, Geordie, West Country cider festival, Cockney or my own ’slightly Yorkshire with hints of Nottingham and Lincoln’ dialect.

What’s particularly amusing about this is precisely what the searches returned when various people said “iPhone” into their mobile phone, expecting their iPhone to show a search for, erm, iPhone.

Nope. One Scottish gentleman was given searches for ‘Sex’, users in Wales got back searches for ‘Gorillas’ and ‘Kitchen Sink’, and the fairly safe bet of the Surrey accent brought back results for ‘My Sister’ (no joining those phrases together, trust me, you’ll come up with some bizarre and possibly illegal combinations).

Well, I know someone who has an iPhone 3G, our very own Dan… so, I shall be updating this post tomorrow, after we’ve downloaded it, and tried some of our own searches to see what stupid results we get back…

EDIT: We’ve done it, and downloaded the Google Voice Search app, and… yep, it doesn’t work with ANY of our accents. Oh yes, it produced some rather humorous search results, though! And here they are – what we said, first, then what Google thought we said (and yup, we did several for ‘iPhone’)…

iPhone – life poem, Amazon, weather, losing eyesight, typhoon, css ie, Verizon
monkey – wiki
tom jones – home gyms
battery – Tetris

…but my favourite has to be… 

pork chop - adult shop

Ah-hahahahahahahahaha!

So, it would definitely seem that the only way to use Google Voice Search on your iPhone is to speak into the mobile phone, using an American accent. We confirmed that, too, with both me and Dan putting on dodgy American accents to say iPhone. There is probably a very, very high chance anyone doing this will sound like Dick Van Dyke on a bad day, or, god help you, Jason Statham.

Although on the plus side, for everyone else, we are to be treated to the hilarious spectacle of hundreds of UK iPhone users shouting at their mobile phones using truly terrible American accents, to get their search feature working, and thus making complete tools of themselves…

Can you tell I’m looking forward to that part?

I say get a better phone than the iPhone; grab yourself the HTC Touch HD today!