Hello guys ! This is Praveen. This is my personal blog of my interests with gadgets .
Google Map’s newest competitor, Bing Maps, went live in its beta stage early this afternoon. Just like the rest of Bing.com, it features a very aesthetically pleasing interface. But looks aren’t everything so can it compete with Google Maps? Well after playing around with it for a while, I think it just might.
For starters, it has every basic feature you expect to see with an online map resource; directions, traffic, satellite and road view. Something that I found to be innovative is what they call “Bird’s Eye” view. Basically, it’s a more detailed version of the aerial view and it’s at a slight angle. It gives things a little bit of a different perspective.
Just light Google Maps, Bing Maps has its own version of StreetView called StreetSide. The biggest difference is that Bing doesn’t yet have a very large amount of streets you can use it on; mostly in big cities. But this can be expected because it is only a beta that was released not 12 hours ago. Something else is that it is very slow and laggy but we can hope for improvement as the days go by.
Bing also features a “What’s Nearby” function. It does exactly what it sounds like it would do; tells you what’s around. Not just restaurants, but everything that’s around like automotive shops, art galleries, bars, gas stations, etc…
Another cool, stalker-like function Bing Maps has is Twitter Maps. Whenever someone updates their twitter status, if Bing knows where you updated it, someone else can see that plus what your status is. You can even retweet tweets from Bing and see previous tweets from the same user. It may be a bit stalker-prone but it is still cool nonetheless.
Microsoft’s new technology, Photosynth, is also present in Bing Maps. Photosynth allows you to look at pictures of 3D objects from every angle. But these objects have to be determined before hand, you can’t just look at every street pole from any angle. They usually seem to be landmarks or sometimes even random items like this Acura.
Bing Maps has quite a few other features, too much to go through in this article but here is a picture of all of them. Some of them like the Travel Webcam sound pretty neat.
