Microsoft just released the “Bing” application for iPhone and it is a solid effort. It was voice search that is similar to the Google app, and Maps implementation that is similar to Google Maps on the phone.
It’s a free app, so it’s certainly worth downloading and trying out. Chris Pendleton has a nice writeup of it on the Bing Community blog, where he highlights some the new features on it. Most of the features are similar to the pre-installed Google Maps, but the voice search in Bing Maps is a slick feature that Google Maps doesn’t have. The rest of the features are almost identical to the Google Maps app.
So which should you use? It depends what you do with it. In my case, I typically use it for real-time traffic. I’ll occasionally do a search on it, but usually just want to see which which interstate I should avoid. Below is a side-by-side look at the two apps showing real-time traffic around Atlanta. Google Maps is on the left, Bing on the right:
It’s not even close! Bing has all kinds of shading and blurring, which looks very nice, but makes it a pain to see what the colors are. Is that a yellow, or the road color? Is that orange in there? It’s quite a mess.
Google’s may look more childish, but it’s far easier to see. If I want a quick look at the traffic, I’ve got it.
The Bing app is pretty great, and overall I’m very impressed with it. However, I’ll keep using Google Maps (for now), simply because it does a better job for what I need.
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