8. Searching And Navigating With Nokia Maps

There are three main options for searching in Nokia Maps. You can pick a location and choose Search Nearby, which gives you a hierarchical set of categories. For Shopping, you can look for kiosks, department stores, malls and ATMs. You can also see all the shopping-related locations or drill down into a range of shop types, ranging from pharmacy to sports. Unfortunately, it can’t find a point of interest along a route that has already been calculated.

You can also search for an address or name, but unless you’re totally accurate, often the less detail you give the better: ’145 north east place’ in Kirkland will give you no results, while 145 will produce a list with NE 145 Place at the top. There’s no auto-completion -except when selecting the country. Searching by name works best for local locations but we couldn’t find several test locations: the Empire State Building, the Ferry Building in San Francisco, Shibuya restaurant and the Vagabond Inn in Las Vegas. You can search for a category name like sushi but you’ll only get restaurants with sushi in the name. There’s a category for post offices under Services but it includes the usual sprinkling of businesses that aren’t USPS offices. It doesn’t show the closest post office to our test address at the top of the list, either. If the place you want isn’t in the list of results, you can’t ask for more matches.

Results are shown by distance; you have to select a result and wait for the full address to scroll sideways to read it. Click on one of the results and you can see it on the map. Zoom out far enough and you may spot the other results but there isn’t an option to jump straight to the next results. You can also get details like the street address, distance and phone number (though not a rating and hardly ever a Website). You can also search for nearby businesses, plan a route, start navigating, save or send the location or call the business. The previous version hid calling as an option under the details and made you go back to the Options menu and make the location full screen before you could do anything else. So having to scroll through the whole list of options to call is actually an improvement. When you save a place as a "Landmark," you can tag it in a category, to keep things organized.

If you want to tell a friend where you are or where you’re going to be, you can send a location by text, MMS, email, Bluetooth or infrared. If you’re sending it by SMS, this only sends the address as text, which doesn’t always give a specific enough location (such as Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas). You can save a location as an image and then send it yourself as an email or MMS, which is a much clearer way of showing the address, but this involves more work.

If you know the person you’re sending your location to has Nokia Maps on their phone, all the other ways of sending give them a link that will open a map as well as the text. This link is an LMX geocode and a handful of PC applications like GPS Visualizer can also open it, but it isn’t a way of sending a map that everyone can take advantage of.