Bing app Officially Debuts on the iPhone

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Ok hands up, who remembers that Microsoft got their start developing iPhone apps for Apple? Oh wait that’s going to date me…. That’s Seadragon, the amazing image browsing app that was released exactly a year ago. With their recent development of a Bing app for the Apple store, Microsoft has fulfilled their promise of bringing voice search to the iPhone. Bing is Microsoft’s somewhat flaky search engine alternative to the almighty Google. Now that it has turned up as an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, more people might actually pay it some attention.

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Wanting to be all things to all people Bing purports to be a full featured search engine, err, decision engine that just came out in June this year. Bing is the latest iteration of Microsoft search engine attempts beginning in 1998. Now that there are a bazillion iPhones in use worldwide Microsoft wants a piece of that action for sure!

With it’s search engine market share hovering around 9 percent in the US for online internet use, mobile use could conceivably bump that up. This gives Microsoft more opportunities to keep their brand in the public eye and generally improve their image suffering from Vista-itis. While there are no noticeable ads on Bing mobile yet, you can be sure that Microsoft has plans to monetize it once they think the ads won’t scare customers away.

Bing does have speed going for it, as long as it does not crash first (which it seems to do regularly in voice search mode). But its new set of powerful intuitive tools certainly gives it the potential to out-perform Google mobile. Image searching is where the Bing app shines the most. It is very fast and user friendly. Bing’s image search provides so many great results it is almost overwhelming. The Bing app’s start page, like its desktop browser home page, is very colorful. Just a tap on its beautiful screen image, icons will appear to give users more background information on that particular image.

The crash bugs will undoubtedly be worked out. However it remains to be seen if people will place their trust in a search engine developed by a company known more for it’s misses than its hits. For now, enjoy Bing on your iDevice.