Are you an avid Symbian S60 user? Come and have an early look at the Taptu S60 Launcher by becoming a GetJar beta tester!

We created this widget to make it easier to launch a search on Taptu at the tap of a single button, and it’s now available to beta testers here. It places a shortcut to a Taptu search box on the shortcut screen or via the Pencil/Edit key giving you instant access to our ever-growing search engine. Typing in a query to the search box and pressing search opens up the Web and takes you to the results page for that Taptu query in one go.

You’ll need to register on GetJar, and you’ll also get the opportunity to send us your feedback, whether they’re bugs or suggestions. In a few weeks, once you’ve helped us polish it, we’ll release it to the rest of the world.

Download

Yesterday, we sneaked out the latest version of Taptu when you weren’t looking.

Mainly, we released a new version which caters better to low end phones. Some phones, like Motorola RAZRs and previous generations of Sony Ericssons need smaller, simpler pages, tweaked for their limitations. Every time you access Taptu, we detect what mobile phone you’re using and give you the version of the service that will provide the best experience. What’s the point of sending the high end version to your phone if it’s going to crash your browser?

We’ve also released a metric ton of bug fixes and tiny tweaks to improve the service, some of them based on bug reports you’ve sent in – so thank you all for your useful feedback, your comments never go unheard!

*Shifty look around for the boss* I’m not supposed to be telling you this, but we’ve also released a few extra small features, which are very beta. Shh! You’ll just have to go play around with the service to find those out for yourself…

Big excitement here at Taptu yesterday evening. After 8 months of design and engineering we went live with the first of our private beta invites. We’re keeping it to a very small early group for the first couple of weeks. Then we’ll be opening it up to a larger private beta before we launch at the Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco in the middle of October. Very promising early feedback so far, and now we’re just itching to take it public. (By the way, you can join the beta mailing list here)

Very nice of Rudy de Waele to praise our “super-simple design interface”. You can’t imagine how much effort has gone into getting this right. Since January we’ve run 7 studies in our new user experience lab testing different aspects of the UI, that’s 70 users giving us their candid opinion from hands-on use and abuse of our prototypes.

Our engineering team have done a pretty amazing job since we started in January. We took the decision to use open source infrastructure components wherever we could, but this still left a lot of gaps to fill if we were going to deliver on our goal of a fully-clustered, triple-redundant, fault-tolerant architecture running on commodity 1U servers, scaleable to millions of users. An architecture which also has to serve results pages in an optimised and reliable way to hundreds of different handsets across a multiplicity of GSM and CDMA mobile networks. Now we’ve taken a very big step closer towards this goal.

Our novel social-assisted search (SAS) approach means that we also have to write custom crawlers and parsers for each content category (music, movies, sports, etc) which we point at our selected social Web source sites. Now we have the basic infrastructure for all this in place we can begin to add additional content categories at a much faster pace. So expect to see a rapid expansion of the scope of our system over the next 6 months.

Today, Taptu is a universal mobile search engine, but the SAS optimization approach is only applied to music. With SAS switched on, we can give you useful results almost all the time in 10 clicks or less. Without it, we fall back to the 25 or more clicks that you normally see in today’s mobile search engines. So for searches outside music, Taptu doesn’t perform any better today than the big 3 mobile search engines (for us, the big 3 means Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) . This will change as we switch on SAS for other big categories like movies, travel, sport, games, and mobile web. Then you’ll really see what SAS can do.