The other day, the Windows Team Blog offered up five new ways in which the Windows Phone team is trying to promote development for Windows Phone. My favorite feature of the five that they listed was the Bing Visual Search feature which allows users to simply find a Windows Phone app that they enjoy, visually. Here’s how that works.
First, you’ll need to head over to the Bing Visual Search page. Below is an example of the screen that should pop up if you’ve used my link:
Currently, the top ten Windows Phone apps, according to Bing Visual Search stand as:
- YouTube
- Xbox LIVE Extras
- Adobe Reader
- Shazam
- Netflix
- The Weather Channel
- Unite
- IMDb
That’s not too bad of a list, if I may say so myself. Personally, my favorites from this list would probably be Xbox LIVE, Netflix, Twitter, and IMDb. Furthermore, if you click on one of the apps shown in the Visual Search the screen will seamlessly transpose itself and give a more detailed look at that particular application. From there, users can continue by either selecting a different application from the top scroll pane, or by simply scrolling to the right on the bottom scroll pane to find out more information about that particular application.
The bottom scroll pane gives several useful quick glance options at the application including a brief summary of the application, including price, user rating, and the publisher; a description of the application, and an images section the shows how the application will look once installed on the phone. Users can easily click on one of these images to expand it to full size. Once you find your favorite application, you can use the “Scan the Tag” feature, located all the way to the right, with your Windows Phone to easily download your newly found application. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
According to the blog post, the Windows Phone team is coming up with several different ways to promote the new WP7 apps and their developers. It’s definitely worth checking out the other four ways as well. Hopefully, we’ll be able to see some more interesting ways in which Bing can be used to display useful information like the Windows Phone apps.
WinQuire 