There are already a few iPhone apps that use Microsoft’s Bing search engine to scour the web, so it only makes sense that Microsoft launch a proper Bing iPhone app in the AppStore – nevermind the fact that Microsoft is developing mobile applications for its arch-rival’s mobile operating system. Today, Microsoft is making it easier to wade through search engine “noise” with an iPhone app that delivers relevant search results to your iPhone. Bing for iPhone lets you search for map locations, businesses, movies/movie times, news, and even images using the keyboard or you voice. The voice search isn’t as accurate as we’d like to see, but it usually gets the job done just fine (check the video for a demo).
The Bing iPhone app serves up a homepage image whenever you launch the app. Tapping the homescreen hides the navigation controls and replaces them with gray boxes that, when tapped, offer up interesting tidbits of information related to the image. The image search feature splashes the daily image on the screen and offers up related images as thumbnails. Movie search automatically keys in on your locations and list all the movies playing in your area, complete with movie ratings. The news search feature is fairly straightforward, but probably won’t be replacing Google News anytime soon. You can search or browse nearby businesses with the business search feature, and then get directions to the business with a tap of the “directions” tab.
Best of all, you can search for anything in the Bing iPhone app using just your voice!
Still, we have to say that, while putting Bing in easy reach of the millions of data-hungry iPhone users might be a good way to promote Bing, we’d rather see Microsoft putting more resources into Windows Mobile 7.
Bing for iPhone (FREE) [iTunes link]
