Device search is as old as the hills but I'm afraid the Maemo team don't believe in Search much at all. Symbian has had in device search (coupled with Web search) for some time but every time this is raised for Maemo, someone from the the developers answers with why do you want to search, where do you want to search etc.

Same applies for Contact Search. They don't get it that you might want to search for a company name, a phone number, an address.

No, for Search, look on every other OS, but not Maemo. Oh no. We don't do prosaic, useful things like that.

Sorry, but when I see "Asking the other way round: What would you like to search for, and why? ", I get really mad. It's so glaringly obvious why people want to search and every OS has the answer.