Up for some good times with your Windows Phone 7-toting friends? Firing up the new We’re In app puts you on the fast track for geolocation-powered fun.

Select friends from your phone’s contacts, let “your peeps” (Microsoft’s words, not mine) know what you’re up for, and let the app know how long you’d like to make your location known. We’re In offers built-in group messaging — which we already knew was coming system-wide in the Windows Phone 7 Mango update — and lets your friends ask questions and post updates (like “stuck in traffic” or “almost there”) right inside the app. When the event expires, location sharing stops automatically. Participants can also tap “leave” at any time to opt out instantly.

We’re In is sort of like an answer to check-in apps like Google Latitude and Foursquare, though it doesn’t yet offer goodies like check-in deals or badges. Of course, with Microsoft’s affinity for Facebook there’s a decent chance that We’re In could add support for Facebook Places and Facebook deals in future versions of the app.

Keen-eyed observers might also detect some similarities between We’re In and another Microsoft app for Windows Phone 7, Lunchbox. Lunchbox, however, is a more 9-to-5 take on things and is geared toward business use — power lunches, spontaneous meetings, and the like.

Microsoft has rolled out a new feature that lets iOS users discover mobile apps related to their searches. Say you’re looking up movie showtimes. Movie-related apps such as IMDB or Fandango might show up in your Bing mobile search results. You have to scroll through a few more traditional listings before you find the app results, but once you see them you can click the links to either open apps already installed on your device or bring up a details page in the App Store.

You can also search for specific categories of apps such as “News apps” or “Travel apps.” For some reason these don’t show up at the top of the page either, but you can click “more results” to see a more detailed list of apps matching your query.

Honestly, I’m not sure I want apps showing up in all of my search results, but it’s nice to know that if you’re looking for apps and don’t feel like navigating through the App Store, Bing is there to help. You can use the new feature by firing up your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad web browser and starting a search at Bing.com.

Research in Motion and Microsoft have announced a deal to make Bing the default search provider for BlackBerry phones. Bing services will also be tightly integrated into the operating system, including Bing maps and location services, local deals, voice recognition, and more.

Since this isn’t just a series of apps, but rather deep system-level stuff, it means that you’ll be able to access location, search, and other features from withing other apps. Microsoft’s Photosynth technology for stitching together multiple photos to create a panorama is also coming to Blackberry.

via SlashGear, IntoMobile and PocketBerry

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Microsoft may be building touch-friendly features into Windows 8 to optimize the operating system for tablets, but that isn’t stopping the company from pushing out apps for other tablet platforms. Today Microsoft launched Bing for iPad, bringing Microsoft’s search, weather, news, and other information to Apple’s tablet.

The Bing home screen is a looker, with a different high quality background image each day. The app also takes advantage of the iPad’s large screen to gie you a search box at the top and tabs at the bottom showing weather, news, finance, and other information at a glance.

At the most basic level, you can use Bing for iPad as a search engine. But you can also use the maps feature to get driving directions, the movie section to find show times and reviews, and the weather section to get detailed forecasts, among other things. The image search interface is particularly attractive, presenting you with images matching your query on a large grid.

The app features gesture-based navigation, letting you swipe from one screen to the next for more information.

Bing for iPad is available as a free download from the App Store.

Microsoft has updated its mobile Bing web site with a number of new features. But like the last major update to m.bing.com, all of these new features require a browser with HTML5 support, which currently rules out the browser on Windows Phone 7 devices.

So what’s new at Bing for iPhone and Android users?

• Real-time transit directions
• Faster image search
• Movie listings are organized by showtime and nearest theater
• Revamped shopping interface
• Weather autosuggest
• iPhone app search

The new transit directions feature is nice… but a few times when I made a mistake I noticed that when I hit the back button I had to re-enter the complete address over again from scratch. For the most part, the mobile Bing web site is starting to feel more and more like an app and less like a web site since you can perform a number of functions without waiting for a web page to reload. It’s a shame Microsoft Windows Phone 7 users can’t access the latest features in Microsoft’s mobile search engine yet.

via jkOnTheRun

Microsoft has launched a new deals feature, which offers more than 200,000 offers from businesses in 13,000 cities throughout the US. The service is available from the Bing.com web site or from the mobile site (m.bing.com).

The bargains come from The Dealmap, which gathers its data from Groupon, LivingSocial, Restaurant.com and other services. If you’re wondering why you should use Bing instead of the Dealmap web site or mobile apps, it’s because the Bing user experience is optimized for mobile and you can use it without installing a single thing on your phone. Just click the Deals button from the Bing mobile web site and let your phone share your location, and a list of local businesses offering deals will appear.

The top of the screen plots the deals on a map, and there’s a drop-down menu letting you sort deals by distance from your current location or expiration date.

You can also use the filters at the top for the page to look for saved deals, nearby deals, or sort by category. And of course, Bing wouldn’t be much of a search engine if you couldn’t  also search for deals by entering keywords in the search box.

Bing Deals is available on most desktop browsers and on mobile browsers on iOS and Android devices. Because the service relies on HTML5, Windows Phone 7 isn’t currently supported. Microsoft’s mobile platform should get an HTML5-capable web browser later this year.

Microsoft has released a major update to its apps for Android and iOS, and the update is a doozy. Among other things, the new iOS version adds:

• Bing Streetside views (Bing’s answer to Google Street View)
• More transit directions and real-time transit updates for several cities
• Find movies by name, location, or theater
• Find restaurants based on price, cuisine, atmosphere or location
• Check-in to Facebook, Foursquare, or Windows Live Messenger
• Set a reminder to get a notification when you’re a location

Meanwhile, the latest Android version of Microsoft’s Bing app gets a whole different set of updates, including:

• “What’s Nearby” feature which detects nearby locations and shows you local restaurants, movie theaters, hotels, and more
• Ability to bookmark images from an image search
• Search Widget now lets you search third party apps such as Yelp in addition to Bing
• Book reservations through OpenTablet or GrubHub from search results

Bing 2.0 for iOS is available as a free download from the App Store, while Bing 1.02 for Android is available from the Android Market.

A few months ago Microsoft launched a Bing app for Google Android that allows users to search for images, pictures, maps, directions, news, or you know, web pages. It might seem a bit strange to use Microsoft’s search engine on an operating system designed by Google, but the Bing app actually has a really nice look and feel and competition is always a good thing.

The only problem was that at launch the Bing app was only available for Verizon Wireless customers. Now that restriction has been lifted and the Bing app is available as a free download from the Android Market for most Android phones.

Like the desktop version of the Bing search engine, the Bing app features high quality background images and search result filters such as maps, news, movies, local, and images.

One of the sections I’m most impressed by is “local.” Click on the local tab and you get a list of categories including restaurants, shopping, transportation, art& entertainment, and so on. When you click on the restaurants tab, you get a list of eateries near your location, plus icons you can tap to call the restaurant or find its position on a map.

That’s not the only location-based feature though. Click on the Movies tab and you’ll get a list of movies playing in your area. You can find descriptions, trailers, and showtimes at nearby theaters for each of those films.

All told, the Bing app offers a decent alternative to Google’s default apps, plus a few bells and whistles like a native image search app. Most of these services are also available using Bing’s mobile web page in a web browser, but the Bing apps is faster and prettier.

You can check out a few more screenshots after the break.

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