In a nutshell…

Quick searching of your phone’s contents, as well as the interweb. Nokia’s suped up its search utility and added a way to filter the stuff already on your phone. Quick and clever, but useful?

Judgement time…

You might remember we gave Nokia Search four stars when we last took a look at it. We said it “wasn’t groundbreaking” but was handy, and nothing much has changed. It’s still the fastest way to find stuff online without trawling through a web browser, but now Nokia’s added a way to scope the stuff already on your blower.

It’s a smart addition, and sniffs out contacts, files, messages and more in just a few taps.

Search is smart enough to look inside messages too, making it handy for finding buried information. We tested it by searching for week-old directions, long since buried in our inbox. On an N95 the information was displayed in under 10 seconds.

Impressive, yes, but useful? It’s hard to say. See, the trouble is that, with the exception of messages and contacts, few items on modern mobiles have contextual names. Searching for an image is pointless, as they’re automatically numbered, not named. Search also failed to root out our MP3 files, even though they were properly named and organised.

So has this new version gained Nokia any extra points? We’re afraid not. It’s still devilishly useful online, but while in-phone searching is smart, it’s not nearly as useful day to day.