The Bing AppEx team had released its apps in preparation for the launch on Windows 8 last year, but they were nowhere to be seen on Windows Phone 8 which actually launched after Windows 8. It has been thus, a great example of how Microsoft, as a company, doesn’t work like a single entity. That has slightly changed now, with the team releasing their apps for Windows Phone 8. Following the latest update to the search app, the Bing apps, which were the only decently designed first party apps on Windows 8 like Bing News, Finance, Sports and Weather are now available on Windows Phone 8.
The Bing News app has all the latest headlines, categories, videos and just what you would expect out of an app that covers news. But unlike RSS aggregators, this covers all the major sources by default and lets you choose various sources, not add them, but there are a lot for each category. It provides breaking news alerts via push and live tiles, so that is a good thing. Another important addition is regional news sources, which are excellent for region specific news feeds. A pretty feature rich app, and is nicely designed too.
The Bing sports app is dedicated to following the sport scenes all over the world. You can add you favorite team and follow their results, news, videos and more. Yes, you can follow virtually every sport and it does support cricket too. Nicely designed app for sports lovers. Bing weather is a simple app and we are glad that there is finally a reliable free weather app with a simple live tile for displaying current weather. Bing Finance is all about the stock market performance, wall street news and what not. If you are a Stock market junkie, you can pin specific companies to the start screen to monitor their daily performance.
These apps boast nice designs and are perform great, but we can’t help but think this is kinda late, as it’s been already an year since it was shown off in Windows 8. Microsoft should know better, and the working together part is just not happening as they would like us to believe.
Source Windows Blogs