4. Live Search

Live Search starts not with a map, but with what you can look up. It shows your current location, with the option to change it, plus buttons for maps, directions, traffic and categories.

If you don’t have a keyboard on your phone and you don’t want to spend time tapping out a long name on a numeric keypad, there are several ways to pick your location in Live Search, with or without a GPS.

You only see a map when you look at a result or a route, or if you click the Map button to explore an area; if you want to see an address and phone number or read through the steps of a route quickly, that fills the screen without the distraction of a map. The list of results is very clear, and as you scroll through you get useful details for each one, including the address and distance from the set location, or you can view one or all of the results on the map. You can find places without any typing at all; you can set your location on the map and pick from contacts or common types of businesses or recent searches, then click links to get directions or text the address to a friend.

The Map All option is very useful for working out which of the businesses is the one you want, but you can also see the street address quickly, and you can find other businesses nearby, so it’s easier to work out an efficient trip. This is the best of the three at working with the addresses you already have - you can use a contact in your address book or GPS to set your general location, either in directions or as part of a search. If you do have a keyboard you can type in part or all of an address, and you get a chance to correct it before the map loads if Live Search doesn’t find the right place.

Live Search is very good at finding most things - coffee shops, gas stations, restaurants, contacts in your address book - but for some reason it’s very poor at finding post offices. Although most searches find the place and business you want, two of our test searches didn’t produce a useful result. We couldn’t find the Shibuya restaurant in Las Vegas, just people named Shibuya (Live Search finds residential listings from phone books as well as businesses). Searching for postal offices in and around San Jose didn’t find the nearest USPS office, but did find several locations that might have mail boxes but nothing otherwise to do with the USPS. Still, other searches produced the correct results, and it was easier to work with the results than in the other applications.