There are many reviews that can give you the basic run-down of Bing’s feature set, so I am going to spare you the boring rudiments and just point out a few nuggets of information that most reviews of Bing for the iPhone have missed.

Bing App for the iPhone and iPod Touch

The Bing app for the iPhone / iPod Touch is, quite simply, a great application. From its UI (user interface) to its functionality and ease-of-use, Microsoft’s Bing app for the iPhone / iPod Touch is a pleasure to use. The Bing app seems to outdo any single app Google has for the iPhone at the moment, and in a few aspects outdoes the entire Google Mobile suite of apps.

From a visual design point-of-view, Bing hit a home run. Bing for the iPhone looks better than Google Mobile. The UI is clean, modern, and has a sense of well thought out UX (user experience) as well as a strong visual design aesthetic. Right down to the daily-changing background photo matching the main accent color of Bing’s UI (the muted orange in image above) on the initial launch day of the app.—knowing that most reviews will include this image in their blogs/articles. Bing makes Google Mobile feel a bit clunky, bloated, and dated.

Reading some of the published reviews of Microsoft’s Bing Mobile app for the iPhone / iPod Touch I have noticed that, as with most reviews of other iPhone apps, the reviewer will not test the app on an iPod Touch, and, hence, not comment on any of the iPod-Touch-specific differences and/or features. The iPod Touch is a runaway hit, with over 16 million units sold in a two year period, yet most reviewers give the Touch no love—most reviews of apps are completely iPhone-centic. Keeping this in mind, as well as the fact that I have an iPod Touch and not an iPhone, most any review I write about an app for the iPhone OS will contain an iPod Touch slant.

Segueing from the above paragraph, here is a special note for iPod Touch users: Bing has the ability to search via voice input with an external mic, like those small, thumb-tack sized ones that can be purchased on Ebay for about five dollars, or the mic attached to your headphones, should you have headphones with a mic. I hooked up my $5-special and it worked like a charm! Just click on the small microphone icon in the top right of the app. The voice input/recognition worked perfect for the half dozen verbal queries I made. Currently, Google Mobile’s voice input is iPhone-specific, leaving 16 million iPod Touch users voiceless. Also, Bing’s voice input works for more than just web searches, it works, in some form or another, in all six different sections of the Bing app—images, movies, maps, businesses, news, and directions.

Another iPod Touch specific feature of this app is its ability to do landscape-mode at any time, and all the time. IPod Touch users seem to be more landscape-centric than their iPhone-using, portrait-centric (usually older) brethren. Not only does the Bing app allow for full-time landscape-mode, but the UI implementation of Bing in landscape is especially well designed. Apple could take a cue from Microsoft in this one respect, and give us iPhone, and especially us iPod Touch users the option of full-time landscape-mode!

Bing’s image search is, surprisingly, better than anything the Google Mobile app currently has. This is not surprising because Bing possesses a better image search, but because Google is lacking a bit.

One thing that seems a bit odd is that upon executing a search in Bing, and clicking on the link, Bing does not take the user to the iPhone’s web browser, Safari, to view the website. Instead, the Bing app stays open and (most likely, using the webkit app built into the iPhone OS) provides a less than great browsing experience—the Bing app takes up too much space in its web browser mode with title bars, footers, etc., yet provides no easy way to jump to Safari for a more-rich browsing experience.

Barring the one misstep mentioned above, Bing app for the iPhone delivers the goods. If Microsoft has high hopes of wrestling a large chunk of the mobile search market away from Google, this Bing app for the iPhone and iPod Touch seems well-poised to facilitate that expectation. Bing is free and can be downloaded from the iTunes Store.