Bing Unveils iPhone Application with Maps

Last night the world was abuzz with the release of Bing’s iPhone application. The application is fully described on the Bing Search Blog, however, I wanted to go a bit deeper on the Maps part of the application for my fellow geospatial peeps. The following is a laundry list of Bing iPhone application features:

Location Enabled – Bing Maps for iPhone locates your position based on the GPS onboard the phone. The application will prompt you on whether to use your phone’s position. Click ok.

Multiple Map Styles – Road, Shaded (sort of a terrain road map, Aerial and Hybrid maps are all supported on the app

Zoom In / Out – Double touch or pinch out to zoom in; pinch or use the zoom icon to zoom out.

Voice Command – The voice command feature will listen to what you’re saying to transcript it into text for submission to Bing Maps’ search service.

Geocoding – Input information as a free text field to locate places of interest, businesses and locations. Respective pins will be placed on the map.

Directions – Directions come in multiple flavors: shortest route based on time (clock icon); shortest route based on distance (the ruler icon); driving directions as if you were in a car (the car icon); walking directions if you’re just walking (the pedestrian icon); traffic-based routing that takes into consideration the current traffic flow to produce the optimum route. A route overlain on the map with step-by-step directions. Plus a real-time pushpin to indicate your current location.

History – All of your historical search requests will be kept…unless you want them deleted.

Map View – View all search results on a map.

List View – View all search results as a list.

Traffic – Traffic flow will be overlain as a transparent map.

Detailed Results – Results will include a popup with the business name, a rating, a phone icon (to call the business) and a car icon (to generate driving directions).

Super exciting for iPhone users (yes, I’m one of them…for competitive analysis, of course). It’s really great to now have a FREE Bing Search application on iPhone for mapping and routing. You can stop using that other iPhone map application now…if you want. :)