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, and categories. Movies and traffic are only available for the US, but in this version you can swap between the UK and US by choosing Menu > settings. Not only does that hide the options that don’t apply in the UK, it means you get the right list of cities to scroll through when you’re setting your location. If you haven’t changed the country you can still see both UK and US cities by going back a screen.

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 and 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 the results on the map. If there are ratings on MSN for that business you see them in the details view, but not in the list of results, which might be more useful for helping you choose. You can find places without any typing at all; you can set your location on the map or by choosing a city 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.

When you get a list of results 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, 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, petrol 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). And searching for postal offices in and around San Jose didn’t find the nearest USPS office and did find several locations that might have mail boxes but weren’t anything to do with the USPS. But other searches produced the correct results and it was easier to work with the results than in the other applications.