Windows Live Search for mobile beta

Over the last few days Microsoft have made a Beta available of Windows Live Search for mobile (download). There has been loads of comments on how good it is, so I thought I would give it a go – I’m almost amazed.

It’s one thing being able to see down to minute detail from a PC, being able to do the same thing from a mobile device opens up a whole new set of possibilities. As an example I searched for my church and it returned a whole load of really useful details, great. Clicking on the “map” bar then showed a remarkable combined map and aerial view. I then asked for directions to my house, which were faultless (as you’d expect these days) what I found particularly nice, though, was the ability to click another button and get a map and aerial view of the next turn. It’s not GPS, but it’s still fabulous.

The category searches don’t seem to work for my area, but the beta is only advertised as being a US based beta so I’m not surprised.

I was going to try both Google and Live, but at the Gizmodo review said that it was a clear win for Microsoft so I haven’t bother with the Google offering.

All of my testing (playing) has been done over a WiFi network from an iMate SP5 which I have. I’ve not tried it on GPRS because the person paying the bill is a bit twitchy about data charges. I suspect that it’s not quite as impressive over GPRS because of the bandwidth limitations.