Popular Science picks Google Now as the Innovation of the Year

Read more and see photos via the source link.

Source:
http://www.androidcentral.com/popular-science-picks-google-now-innovation-year

Popular Science:
http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2012-11/google-now

I definitely think Google Now is cool. I haven't found a whole lot of utility for it, though. Maybe it's because I don't travel all over the country, venture into different time zones, visit places where I need to know currency exchange, book flights once a week or live in a traffic-congested urban jungle.

Cool? Yes. Innovation of the Year? Not so much. I'd like to see Google Now take on even more utility by unifying the experience to desktop/webtop services, too. I'd like to be signed into my Google account on my desktop and see Google Now notifications pushed there. I'd also like to see other services incorporated into Google Now. I use Google Reader a lot and I "star" things that I really like or want to re-read. I think that information could be interpreted and a Now card could be generated when similar news comes through Reader. I think integration with GoogleTV would be awesome, too. Schedule a program to record on your GoogleTV, it parses that information to Google Now and then sends you a Now card shortly before your show airs, so you can watch it live if you can't wait.

But I do really like the new package shipping feature. But, out of four packages that I've had shipped since the feature has existed it's only picked up two of them. And those two were both from Amazon. That feature clearly needs some work. The weather feature is nice, but that's about all that can be said for it. The "distance to home" and "distance to work" actually works very well and it really has learned my schedule. Now gives me cards to get home 10 minutes before my lunchbreak. The only problem that I personally have with it is that I work 5 minutes from home, so the super cool utility is fairly lost on me.

I think it brings a lot of promise, but I also think it could be improved on in a lot of ways. But I have complete faith in Google to bring this service to the forefront and make huge strides. Just look at Android and what happened between Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich.