4. Searching And Navigating With Ask GPS

Autocomplete speeds up searching because you can often see if you’ve found what you’re looking for after typing just a few letters and the service is usually very responsive. Ask GPS found almost all of the businesses, services and addresses we looked for, missing only the obscure Vagabond motel in Las Vegas. Searching for the nearest post office gave typically confused results, depending on what you type in. For USPS, we got one real post office several miles away and other businesses, like a scooter center. A search for "post office" listed ten real post offices - including the closest - and one building-design company.

The list of results shows the name and address, plus a review score for businesses based on Citysearch. When you select a result you see it on the map, with the choice of getting more information or skipping to the next result. Pick the details and you can see the full address, view the full Citysearch reviews on which the rating is based, call the business, get directions, send the address to a friend or save it to use later.

Saving locations means you don’t have to look them up again. However, you can’t use this feature for planning routes in advance, because you can only get directions from where you are now. Like searches, calculating the route is done over the air, on the Ask GPS servers.

Directions are a mix of maps and turn signals. The map shows your position as a car or pedestrian icon - not to scale - with and arrow and color highlights and the next turn listed in a strip at the bottom of the screen, with direction, distance and street name. Ask GPS speaks the first direction immediately but you can step through the journey in advance as a sequence of maps, with the distance counting down. If you’re driving, once you’re in motion you see a safety version of the screen with a large turn arrow plus the road you’re currently on, the distance to the next turn, the number of steps in the route and the overall distance. As you can’t look at the details of the screen when you’re driving, you can press the OK button to hear the turn you have to make next. Press OK again to hear the distance remaining.