2. Ask GPS

Ask GPS is on the M1’s application menu but you can add it to the list of favorite links on the front screen for easy access. When you open it up, you see five icons, including Citysearch and Evite as well as more standard navigation tools; you don’t need to wait for a map image to load or GPS acquisition before you start.

If you use Evite to organize your diary, Ask GPS will navigate you to events. Citysearch is a guide with ratings and reviews, which can be more useful than a simple list of points of interest. If that’s all you want, you can pay $2.99 a month, but the full $9.99 a month gives you turn-by-turn navigation.

You can search for businesses and attractions directly from the Citysearch icon, but it’s also an option under the Directions icon, along with address, intersection, places you’ve already saved, airports and Evite events. There’s no way to navigate to addresses from your address book but you can save any address you type in as well as businesses you find, with the top two positions reserved for your home and work addresses. You can also look up addresses in advance at city.ask.com and send them to your phone to navigate with.

Duplicating Citysearch at the top level makes sense because you might want to find places that you don’t plan to go to immediately and you can choose to search at your current location, in nearby towns or anywhere in the U.S. As you type in a business name, a type of business or the town to look in, the software offers suggestions based on what it has listed for your location and what’s close to where you’ve been recently. This can save a lot of typing, and is handy as the Sanyo M1 doesn’t have T9.