Apparently, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform isn’t doing well in the lucrative and ever-growing smartphone market unlike the iPhone, RIM and Android operating systems. As the saying goes: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” In a bid to stay competitive, Microsoft’s mobile team has finally made an iPhone and iPod Touch app for Bing. The app is now available and you can download it from the Apple iTunes app store or by pointing your iPhone browser to m.bing.com, which will redirect you to the app store.
The free app comes in a simple but pretty impressive interface, and it looks similar to its web version, which features beautiful landscape photos on the home screen. It even comes complete with clickable hotspots to discover related trivia. By default, there are six categories on the center of the page: Images, Movies, Maps, Businesses, News and Directions. When you search for “coffee” under the the “businesses” tab, the app will display the best coffee house near you, including a scorecard which shows you how good the place is.
There’s also an infinite scroll feature that works for any search result. For example, users can view virtually unlimited images and search results by simply scrolling down the page. iPhone users can easily flick through image previews and click through to the host site.
Not surprisingly, voice search is included in the iPhone app too. It works great for map locations as well as old fashioned web search. Just say “San Francisco weather,” for a quick result, or even say a full address for a map or directions. Its mapping feature is quite impressive too – the map pans and zooms are pretty fast and smooth. It uses Seadragon technology for some of this.
Currently, the Bing app is only available on iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Sidekick. The Redmond-based tech juggernaut has yet to launch an app for Google Android.
Last week, we reported that Microsoft is currently developing MSN messenger app for the iPhone, which will likely be released in March 2010, alongside with the upcoming Windows Live Wave 4 updates.