Make spring break easier with Windows Live Search

One of the other new features added to Live Search is predictive text input. That's a fancy way of saying that after the software has established your location and you start to type what you're looking for, the software will give you suggestions. So, if you're out with friends and want to check out a night club, you can start to type the word "night" and "night clubs" will appear as one of the search results. This saves you time and helps prevent keyboard typos.

Or, if you're in a quiet enough place, you can try the voice search function. Simply say what you're searching for, and results will come back. The results from my search for “nightlife” give me the names, addresses, and phone numbers for several area spots.

The last new feature of this release is a map view called Bird's Eye. Live Search has always had the Road View, which gives you the names of roads and is helpful for navigating your way. Road View works, but it’s not too pretty. Aerial Photo shows you the street names combined with a top-down satellite photo that gives you a feel for what an area looks like. I'm sure everyone who's used this has zoomed in on their own street just to see what their house looks like from space—it's pretty cool.

Bird's Eye gives an aerial view at an angle (sometimes called a three-quarter view) that lets you see more street-level detail and, because it's at an angle, it's easier to understand what you're looking at. In fact, with the combination of a bird's eye view and the overlaid street names, it's pretty easy to use it as a walking map—especially when you toggle on the "Track Me Using GPS" feature that gives you a live icon of your location on the map as you move. This is some seriously cool stuff, people.

If you haven't used this application before, check out all the other amazing features that can help you get the most out of your spring break adventure. For example, once you find a restaurant or night club you want to go to, you can easily use SMS to send the name, address, and phone number of the place to your friends. You can get directions to or from that location, search nearby (perfect for lining up a dinner, coffee, and night club adventure), or even save that location to a contact if you liked it and want to remember to return in the future. Live Search for mobile also helps you make the most of your time in a new place, with easy-to-find movie listings, traffic updates, weather information, and even a feature that lets you locate the lowest gas prices in your area. And I haven't even mentioned some of the other fun things, like being able to look up photos that were taken near your location. Live Search for mobile can make your Windows Mobile phone more useful, more helpful, and even more fun—it's definitely a must-have piece of software.