When you find a business you can see it on the map, get directions to or from the address and place a phone call easily - you get a chance to cancel the call if you didn’t mean to call rather than having to hang up quickly.

Directions are particularly good in Live Search; you get a list of turn by turn directions and you can see the whole route on the map or just a single turn, plus as you scroll over the map route the turn directions update as you reach the right area of the map. That means you can scroll around to check out the area without losing track of the directions and you don’t have to fumble for number keys all the time. If you have GPS –or you use a Wi-Fi location service like Navizon (www.navizon.com) – you can jump to your location, so you’re in the right place in the directions. And if you miss a turning as you drive along, you’ll get a prompt to plan a new route, instead of having to work out where you are on the map or cancel the route and start all over again. Even without GPS, if you take a detour along the way and use the Live Search map to work out where you’re going, when you’re ready to get directions again you can choose Reroute from here; again it saves setting up the route from scratch.

Map images load reasonably quickly, even when you’re looking at satellite images. The new option in v2 to save map images onto a storage card means you don’t have to wait to see the map in places you’ve visited before – and you don’t have to be in coverage. You can choose how much space to dedicate to this, so the maps won’t fill your storage card.

Live Search is available for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Motorola RAZR, SLVR and PEBL, Nokia Series 40 and 60 phones and several LG, Samsung and Sanyo phones with J2ME. You have to pick your phone by hand at wls.live.com and the BlackBerry links don’t work directly (choose PC version in the error page to get the download). The BlackBerry version has a slightly different interface that lets you use the scroll wheel and keypad to navigate rather than assuming a five-way controller, but the functionality is almost as good (you don’t see the list of turn instructions, just the instructions on the map and you can’t look up contacts in the current version).

On any supported device, Live Search is much more powerful than the Live Search Web site and for many searches it’s the best tool. This app is well designed for what you want to find and do on the move and it’s easy to use one-handed.