One of the perpetual frustrations afflicting cell phone users is the need to fiddle through nested menus to get to the right phone number for a contact.  Search suggestions can help bring faster results, but sometimes it takes a long time to track down the content using that method as well.  Likewise, voice search is a good idea, but not always practical. Anyone who's used it in a noisy setting and had their phone want to dial the wrong person can attest to that.

So Google has come up with a new means of searching on its innovative Android smart phone operating system.  Simply open the new search mode, "Gesture Search" and write the first letter of the thing you're looking for on the screen.  A list of results, including contacts, applications, bookmarks, and music tracks will pop up.  Keep writing letters until you get exactly what you're looking for.

The feature is available now for Android 2.0 users (such as Nexus One customers) -- just stop by the Google Labs page for the new service, found here.

What's impressive is not merely the intuitive nature of the search, but also the quality of detection.  If your touch-screen handwriting skills are poor, Google's search software will actually keep the search within multiple characters.  For example if you write an "A" with an open top that looks kind of like an "H", it will grab both the "A" and the "H" results.  Both uppercase and lowercase characters will be accepted.

The search also used traditional prioritization methods, placing your most common and most recent searches at the top of the results when you start engaging in your next search.

Google Gesture Search certainly seems like a great and intuitive feature that should add a lot of everyday value to busy Android users.  They better hope Apple doesn't own a patent on "Drawing Stuff on a Multi-Touch Screen" or something and try to sue, though.