Bing Spreads Wings in Apple's App Store

Bing the Smartypants

The Bing app for the iPhone and iPod touch has been launched less than a month after Microsoft released a BlackBerry version of the app. Bing apps are also available on Windows Mobile, BREW, and the Danger operating system, which runs on SideKick devices from T-Mobile.

Despite Microsoft's rivalry with Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) in many fields, it's sound marketing Download Free eBook - The Edge of Success: 9 Building Blocks to Double Your Sales strategy for Redmond to get onto as many mobile operating systems as possible, according to Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat. "Search engines have to do two things: Give people a compelling reason to use them, and be the first thing they go to," he told MacNewsWorld. "Most of the search engines have similar features," he said.

"I think Microsoft realizes it has to move to where the people are, which is the iPhone and Android," Greg Sterling, founding principal at Sterling Market Intelligence, pointed out. "Windows Mobile is a smaller audience than these two," he told MacNewsWorld.
About the Bing App on iTunes

The Bing app in the iTunes app store uses Seadragon technology for panning and zooming in maps, said Justin Jed in the Bing community blog. Seadragon was developed by Seattle Software, which Microsoft purchased in 2006.

Seadragon, a free Web service which is part of Microsoft LiveLabs, combines several technologies to let users view, zoom, pan-into, and share large images on the Internet without degrading or shrinking them. It works with all types of content, regardless of the amount of data used or the network's bandwidth. Seadragon is incorporated into Silverlight.

Bing for the iPhone and iPod touch works well in conducting Web searches or searching maps using voice technology, Jed claimed.

Some users, however, have begged to differ. Several iPhone users complained that the voice features wouldn't work on their devices. "iPhone 3G app simply crashes whenever I try and use the voice features," wrote user "ChadT." Users "nanexcool" and "robin capper" had the same problem with their iPhone 3Gs. "Robin capper" found that voice search either crashed his iPhone or did not return any results. "It's not connectivity, as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) on the same phone shows," he wrote.

On the other hand, Sterling found that voice search worked for him on the iPod touch. Some technical differences could have led to the different results. "Microsoft told me they turned off some of the app's features for the iPod touch," he said.