hmm, how do one id a plant using google? did i miss some king of beta service, like say google plants?

It took years for my mother to get it when I’d show her something on one or another Palm or tablet, only with wifi, nothing extraordinary, from the web. I’d show her the answer to a question, like the location or hours of a store or whatever, and she’d follow up with, “Uh-huh, I see, but can you look it up when you get home?” as though what I’d just done was make-believe, like a picture I’d stored to demonstrate what a computer can do, not what it just did.

A few weeks ago I was at a bar-b-q with a group of 16 to 50 year olds when a discussion took place about an unidentified plant in the yard.
While they were discussing it, I Googled it with my ATT Tilt/WM6 and had the answer, together with a picture of the plant, within less than one minute. All of them were impressed with the ease and speed of use – and that’s how I came to lose possession of my Tilt for the next hour or so! Grrr ;-0

For a first time wow I guess would be last week when I was approached in London and asked if I knew where the American Embassy was. I had to admit I didn’t and off the group went trying to puzzled out from some sort of street map. Meanwhile, I flipped open my N95, Googled it and caught them up and read out the location. Job done.

For a long time, my wife (a very analog creature) looked down on my Palm Treo as an expensive toy. One day we were at lunch and were talking about our plans for having some friends over for dinner. She wanted to stop at the store on the way home and get what we needed to fix dinner, but we couldn’t remember everything we needed. I have Avvenu running on the PC where our recipe files are stored, so I pulled out the Treo, connected to Avvenu on the browser and logged into my home PC. I did a Google desktop search for the recipes, downloaded them to the Treo and put together the necessary grocery list, and sent an SMS message with it to her phone. While she wouldn’t admit it, she was suitably impressed and now when she’s curious about something, she asks “can you look that up on your ‘brain’”?