This new tech steps on more than just Apple’s toes though. Microsoft used to be the king of handwriting recognition (they had it as far back as XP), but now many mobile developers are working on putting the techniques to good use. We do not see this as being amazingly popular in the smartphone space, but for tablets this would be very nice. We do not expect Microsoft to be particularly upset by this as the current scope of this tech is limited to simple searches. We do think that Apple might get annoyed as this is certainly not covered by any of their patents.

Right now you can use this on either Android or iOS by going to goolge.com/preferences and enabling handwrite. It is pretty simple to get this going. One it is setup you simply tap the handwrite icon and start writing with your finger or stylus. As you write of you need more space the API will convert your written letters to text. It also appears to know when you want a space in your string. We tinkered around with it and found it to be a pretty cool idea, but it does need a little more polish.

This new tech will not replace voice search or any type of unified search, but you can see that there is work going on to being new features to old services and continue to build on the touch interface. It will be interesting to see if Apple will try to claim this one as well though.

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