Windows Phone Mango Bing and Local Scout Preview | Pocketnow

Опубликовано 19 июня 2011, 12:13

Windows Phone 7.5's version of Bing has finally seen some updates. It's been kind of embarrassing seeing the Bing iPhone and iPad apps with so many excellent features not available on Windows Phone (or even Windows 7). Now with Mango, Windows Phone 7.5 has the same Bing Vision feature from the iPhone version. This is a great addition with some excellent capabilities. The Bing Vision option turns the camera on and you can point it at things like books, movies, CDs, bar codes, MS Tags, QR codes or anything with text on it. Search results will appear over the image and you can then tap the one you want more information on. If it recognizes any text in the image you're pointing it at, the "scan text" button will be available at the bottom. After you press that it will take a picture and show boxes around each letter it recognizes. Then there'll be a "Translate" button at the bottom, as well as a "Copy All" command in the pop-up menu. Pressing the "Translate" button will let you choose a language you want it translated to and then actually super impose the translated text over the image that you originally took. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. I kind of wish there was a special business card scanning feature built in that would add the person straight to a new contact.

Another crazy new feature in the Bing app is the Music Search button. This one jumps in on "Shazam" territory. Say you're at a lounge or in the super market or where ever and hear a song that you like. Tap the Bing button no matter what other app you're in and then tap the music search button and it will start listening to the song. After a few seconds, if it recognizes the song, it will give you a little notification pop-up with the album cover image, name of the song, artist, as well as a close button and a Marketplace button. Press the Marketplace button and it goes straight to the Zune Marketplace entry for that album where you can instantly stream or download the song (if you have a Zune Pass) or purchase it. Doesn't get much easier than that! In actual use, it has worked very well for most popular songs. For a more obscure song, it recognized the title and author correctly, but didn't load album art and didn't link to the Marketplace correctly. For an unfinished feature though, I was very impressed.

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Windows Phone Mango Bing and Local Scout Preview | Pocketnow
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