With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft went from being a non-entity in the world of modern smartphones to becoming an important player. The old Windows Mobile operating systems had their fans, but they weren’t as consumer-friendly as the iPhone and Android devices.
Bing has just announced a brand new feature, which users can access either in the official iPhone app or from “m.bing.com” in Safari for iOS. The feature, called “iPhone Mobile App Discovery,” displays iOS applications alongside search results when users input keywords into Bing’s search engine. It’s a handy feature, and definitely something users of the service will appreciate. As you can see in the above screenshot, applications are displayed in the search results list.
Google Maps, the stupidly good and free mapping service from the big search engine in the cloud, could well be getting a significant upgrade: offline maps access. At the moment Google Maps does offer a cached version of its maps – through an Android update and only for selected places – but it looks like this could be fleshed out and actually let you search for new map destinations without the need of a data connection. Get your maps out This is something TomTom and Garmin already offers but they do this for a premium. If Google did offer this then it would be offering the same sort of functionality found in Nokia Maps, which comes with selected Nokia handsets, and is pre-loaded on many HTC handsets too.
Nokia has decided to release a new instant messaging client to take on RIM and Apple’s offerings. Dubbed IM for Nokia, this isn’t a proprietary client offering, rather an amalgamation of different platforms into one easy space. This means Google Talk, Ovi Mail, Yahoo! Messenger and MySpace IM are all together in a single app. Anything Apple can do..





