Remember the Nokia Lumia 900? It was the really impressive Windows phone that Microsoft is betting heavily on since its first positive reviews came out of CES 2012. It was announced two weeks ago that the Lumia 900 would be launching April 8. Today is April 8 and guess what, the Lumia 900 is here.
The Bing Team always knowing about the newest cool features coming to Bing have taken to the Bing blog to announce some of the cool stuff Lumia 900 users can do with Bing. The feature is admittedly impressive only because it takes a lot of features from numerous applications on other smartphones and consolidates them into a single Bing application.
The first feature is called Local Scout. It allows users to filter their search results locally. It also brings up results for local dining, shopping and activities. Going to any of the results will tell you “where it’s located, how to get there, who to call, when it’s open, the Web site, and even ratings and reviews.” If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same functionality that Google Places and other services like Yelp! and Foursquare offer.
One of the other much touted features is Voice. It’s just a simple search by voice command. The same functionality is seen in other smartphones as well. It’s usefulness is all over the place, however, with my voice search commands always being misinterpreted.
Now here’s the pretty cool feature even if it is copied from other services. Bing now has music search which will listen to a song and then display the artist, song title and where you can buy it. We’ve been using this kind of technology for a few years now with applications like Shazam, but it’s still new to Bing.
The final feature is Bing Vision which sounds like some kind of night-vision application. Unfortunately, it’s not that exciting. It’s just a product scanner that brings up relevant information on said product.
It’s worth pointing out that all the applications that Bing replicates are also available on the Windows Phone marketplace for free. It’s handy to have all of these applications in one place, but Bing will have to prove that it performs these tasks better than the dedicated applications.