Along with Windows and Windows Phone, Bing is one of the most important cornerstones for Microsoft’s long term future strategy, particularly on the consumer side of things.
Redmond’s other units like Office, Azure and Xbox are going pretty much on track.
But Bing is one Microsoft service that is on track for great things — the company invests an awful lot in this division with the aim of making the search service a shared hub, the very core of its consumer experience on products like Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox.
While the service itself receives momentous upgrades at regular intervals, the search engine packaged as a dedicated iOS app cannot boast the same.
Microsoft has, however, just updated the app to version 4.0.2 and the latest version is now up for download on the iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch.
While this new revision brings a few improvements, it is mainly a bug fix release. The company has not named any errors and issues that got fixed in this release, though. Some user interface enhancements are also included, as are a number of overall performance improvements.
Nevertheless, if you use the app, you can download this new version that will hopefully work better than the previous one. For those of you that do not use it, the app offers voice-activated search along with the ability to search for images.
Users can also scan things and then use Bing Vision to get product information or even recognize cover art for everything from books and games to CDs and DVDs.
Curiously though, the app does not natively run on the iPad — but it is compatible with any and all iOS devices that are running version 4.3 and up. On smaller screens, though, the experience is fine.
Bing for iOS can be downloaded from Apple’s app store for free.
