Bing Mobile Site Optimized for Touch Screens, iPhones
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Microsoft has touch-optimized its Bing mobile site, allowing owners of the iPhone, Zune HD, Verizon Imagio and other devices to navigate the search engine via their multitouch screens. Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.5, the latest version of its smartphone operating system, also includes touch-screen functionality. The increased popularity of devices such as the iPhone has made touch screens a vital component to consider for developers of mobile software.
Microsoft's newest update to its Bing mobile site is optimized for touch, capitalizing on the rising trend in smartphones and other devices that rely on multitouch screens for navigation. Phones and media players that support this mobile version of Bing currently include the iPhone, Zune HD, T-Mobile F1, Verizon Imagio and Samsung Omnia, with Microsoft promising to add support for other devices "over the next couple of months."For more information on Mobile 6.5's new features, click here.
These new services, however, are U.S.-only for the time being-a fact causing a bit of ire among the community visiting the Bing blog. "Why do you continually disregard the rest of the world?" wrote one commenter. "Why do we matter so little to the Bing team?" "It's very annoying seeing all these great features while us folk in the U.K. (and the rest of the world) are still waiting to see them," wrote another. In addition to Bing's mobile site, Microsoft has also focused on integrating increased touch-screen capabilities into Windows Mobile 6.5, its new operating system for smartphones. Stephanie Ferguson, Microsoft's general manager of product management, mentioned in a Sept. 1 post on the Windows Blog that the Microsoft mobile team had dedicated themselves to "making the user interface more touch-friendly and improving notifications and updates from e-mail, text and calendar items." Mobile 6.5's touch capabilities include the ability to navigate via taps, swipes and finger flicks. It also utilizes a new version of Internet Explorer Mobile that renders Web pages in a manner reminiscent of desktop-style. While the popularity of the iPhone and similar devices has made multitouch an increasingly hot proposition for smartphones, touch screens have also been expanding beyond traditional niche segments such as engineering and into the consumer sphere. At the Windows 7 launch, Microsoft heavily promoted its PC manufacturing partners' touch-screen technology, showing off devices that let users navigate their desktop by tapping icons and buttons. Microsoft and its partners currently have applications in development that include a few games and multimedia creation.
