This morning at the BlackBerry World keynote in Orlando, Florida, attendees were a little surprised to see Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer take the stage. What could he possibly be doing down in Orlando during a BlackBerry event? Well, it turns out he was promoting Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, and Bing Maps. In partnership with BlackBerry, future devices will be using Bing as its default search service.
There are plenty of folks who love Bing and prefer it over Google, but there will undoubtedly be a number of BlackBerry users who might bemoan this change. Hopefully RIM will give folks the option of switching if they really want to, but it seems doubtful – especially if this is anything like the move Verizon made in partnership with Microsoft when it dished out BlackBerry devices and some Android models with Bing search only. The only way to get Google search was to use it within the phone’s browser, which isn’t an elegant or preferable solution or fix.
If you’re a die-hard BlackBerry user who absolutely loves Google or Yahoo! search, you’d better start learning to love Bing, too.