Bing Mobile, originally Windows Live Search, was one of those super-useful yet often overlooked Microsoft applications.

The concept originally was to deliver location-based searches to your handset, such as gas stations or movie times closest to your current position. If your mobile phone has GPS, it can automatically update itself to your current location and even give turn by turn directions to the destination of choice.

While sharing a lot of common features with the more popular Google Maps, the big distinction between them to many end-users was that Google Maps was prohibited from offering real-time driving directions due to licensing issues with map providers.
LiveSearch/Bing offered to follow your GPS position, and actually route you in real time, alerting you before turns, just like a stand alone GPS unit, only for free. Back in 2007, it even starting offering a “Speak” command, in which it would do a little voice recognition to determine your destination. This effectively made it more hands-free and therefore safer and easier to use while driving than a traditional GPS unit.

Yet, despite all this, when Google finally made its announcement to start offering turn-by-turn directions in their free mapping application for Android, everyone heralded it as an industry first… Even the voice recognition part of it was proclaimed to be an innovation, despite MS doing this years earlier.

However, as is sadly the par with classic Microsoft products, sometimes functionality comes at the cost of form. The interface for Bing was sub-par compared to the easy and simple Google Maps, with many people never being fully aware that GPS routing was an option (you have to first plot a destination, then click show Map, then click a softkey and tap “follow me using GPS”. This should really start automatically or at least remember the settings from last time).

So is MS to do? Redesign Bing!
So, that is exactly what they did. Microsoft redesigned the entire interface to be more appealing and straight forward, and I dare to say they did a bang-up job. The problem is… they removed the most useful features of the application, including the GPS turn-by-turn routing!

Not only that, but the new application doesn’t seem to remember previous searches. That means unless you go out of your way to save a location as a “favorite”, you have to enter (or “speak”) a destination every time.

Some users over at PPCGeeks.com have mentioned that perhaps this new version is a technical demo / beta, and that more features are expected to come soon.
I sincerely hope this is the case, because the last thing Microsoft needs is to become a “form over function” oriented company like certain “other” companies out there…

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 1:27 pm and is filed under GPS, Microsoft, Windows Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.