14 DAY TRIAL // Redmond-based software giant Microsoft is reportedly gearing up for the release of a full-featured Bing search client for Google's Android mobile operating system. Moreover, it seems that the company would intend to have the solution released into the wild within a matter of weeks, and that it would offer the same features as its iPhone app comes with.
Currently, Android phone users can already enjoy a basic Bing client on their devices, but it sports only limited functionality, such as mapping tasks. According to a recent article on PCWorld, the Android client would arrive with features similar with those available with the desktop version of Bing, such as full Web, image and news search.
Microsoft's Bing search engine has been gaining more and more market share lately, and it seems that the company wants to make steps into the mobile search market too. Bing was officially announced in June last year, and managed to gain about 5 percentage points of the market since then, at least this is what Satya Nadella, senior vice president for Microsoft's online services division, stated. Bing's popularity on mobile is increasing too, as the iPhone client was downloaded over 4 million times.
In addition to trying to expand Bing's reach into the mobile phone market, Microsoft is also said to be working on enhancing the capabilities of its search engine. Thus, new features are being added into the mix, such as returning results that would include weather forecasts from various sites, lists of music than can be purchased or streamed, and more. In other words, Bing is trying to help users take decisions, not only perform searches.
With Windows Phone 7 set to arrive later this year with Bing as its default search engine, and with the mobile clients for Android and iPhone, Bing would certainly be able to reach out to more mobile phone users than before. The inking of various agreements with carriers around the world should also help Microsoft increase its market share in the area.