Microsoft has released its free Bing App for the iPhone and iPod touch over at the iTunes App Store (going to m.bing.com will redirect you there as well). Verizon phones already offer a mobile version of Bing for Windows Mobile, Blackberry, BREW, and Sidekick devices, so this release just adds another OS and device to the mix. Microsoft is also planning to release a Messenger app, too.
The free iPhone app appears to streamline all of the features you could get from Bing’s mobile site–such as image search, news results, driving directions, and maps–into one easy place. Like the Google Mobile iPhone app, Bing also includes voice search, a popular feature.
On its location-based search, Microsoft wrote on its blog that the app will be able to pin-point nearby restaurants, movie theaters, coffee shops and other places of preference by category and will even provide walking or driving directions to the place.
Microsoft has some other iPhone applications out there, but news of the Bing launch has raised some comment given the animosity between Apple and Microsoft though that’s largely in the past these days.
The mobile version is actually remarkably similar to the Web version: the home screen even shows the Bing image of the day, complete with clickable hotspots to discover related trivia and will also include six clickable tabs that will navigate the users to images, movies, maps, businesses, news and directions hotspots.