In a shady deal that alters settings on end user devices without their permission or knowledge, Microsoft and Verizon have agreed to make BING the default search engine on certain BlackBerry devices. Those I know of for certain are the 8830, the Tour and the Storm 2.
I am told that you can select other search engines but only BING can be the default.
Also, apparently a new BING icon also appears on the devices after a hard reset (pull the battery).
This may be OK for new devices where end users expect a lot of extra stuff that they do not require and will clean up. What is NOT expected is for new stuff to show up suddenly unannounced. It is confusing and it is invasive.
I expected better of Verizon.
i am a user of Microsofts BING search engine and it is as good as google for static webpage search. for searching blogs, i think google gives more relevant search results compared bing.
Have you used an apple i-phone or a palm-pre for comparison to the blackberry? I’ll soon be looking for a new phone.
I’d expect worse from microsoft…wait until you get your new bill.
my default search engine is Yahoo but now i am using BING because it is much better than Yahoo. i heard that Bing search engine would power Yahoo search also.
i think that Bing is not as good as Google. Google would still index new websites faster than Bing. Microsoft would still need a lot of catching to do with GoogleBot.
@King – Hey King, I haven’t had a chance to play with the iPhone ‘though I know a couple of people who have it and love it.
I *did* get a chance to play with the Palm Pre for a week or so and quite liked it. I still feel the touch phones are a bit clumsy but they are definitely a huge improvement over the stylus PDA days.
I also had the opportunity to use BlackBerry’s Storm 2 offering. Again, kinda cool but clumsy.
If I had to purchase my own phone (my company buys mine and it’s going to be a BlackBerry for the foreseeable future) I would definitely have a tactile keyboard on it. Even the sliding keyboard like the Pre’s would be acceptable. Rated for long battery life and THEN everything else would matter. If my phone is out of juice or I can’t accurately enter numbers and other information, then it’s not terribly useful to me.
I think we’re about one or two generations from the touch phones being worthwhile.
I use both Bing and Google search engine and i dont see much difference in their search results. I use google for searching hard to find academic topics and Bing for general search.