Microsoft has often played nice with Apple and there are Apple Mac versions of Office, Messenger and even Remote Desktop Connection. Now Microsoft has embraced the iPhone by releasing a Bing app. Although Microsoft has a couple of apps for the iPhone, bringing Bing to the platform is a recognition of the iPhone’s popularity. The app looks quite neat and as well as including voice search, image searching and news it also has location based services like maps and movies.
When you first start the app on the iPhone (as it has GPS) Bing asks for permission to get your location. Then the location based services kick in. When you click on movies, it automatically shows you what is playing in a theatre in your area and similarly it automatically sets your current location as the starting point when using directions.
The voice search could be a really powerful feature. The examples Microsoft give in the blog post announcing the Bing App include: say “San Francisco weather” for a quick result, or even say a full address for a map or directions. Microsoft say the app will also work with complex addresses like “1 Microsoft Way, Redmond 98052.”
Comments on the iTunes App store have so far been generally favourable with one user saying that the new app puts Google’s equivalent app to shame.
As for the user interface, the home screen of the Bing App shows the Bing image of the day, complete with clickable hotspots to discover related trivia. Towards the bottom of the home page there are six categories (Images, Movies, Maps, Businesses, News and Directions) which give you access to the other areas of the app. Also when using the maps it is possible to add pins, save locations and show multiple locations on a single map.
If you are looking for a mobile search application with full map functionality, news, image search, web search (of course), videos and businesses all in one place, then Bing for the iPhone could be the very app for you… You can now download the free Bing App from your phone in the App Store, from your computer at iTunes, or go to m.bing.com and you will get redirected to the app store.
If you have downloaded the app why not let us know what you think.
4 thoughts on “Microsoft's Bing App for the iPhone”
It’s crap. Sorry to say.
I use Bing and Google whenever i want to find something on the internet. I think that both search engines are very good. ,
It is interesting to compare the performance of Bing and Google search but i haven’t seen any difference at all in their performance. –
Typical Microsoft to ignore Europe though, the app appears to be north america only….