Where's Bing?

Bing is the new kid on the search block, albeit from an old hand in the tech industry. As I've noted previously, it's got potential, even if it does some things rather oddly.

If you happen to like Bing and are also an iPhone user, though, it doesn't look like you can set it up as your default search engine (at least, not yet):

And while some might pooh-pooh this with the obvious "It's an Apple product; of course it won't play nice with Microsoft!", I should point out that things between Apple and Google haven't been entirely coming up roses of late either (and Google has its own iPhone app, besides).

Granted, a lot of this owes to the advantage of the incumbent. The iPhone's only been around some two-odd years now, while Bing only went live in June 2009. Hence it will take some time for Bing to make its way into the iPhone OS' search engine options. In the meantime, it's good to see that Bing is already equipped with a mobile version to suit handheld devices:



But until Bing legitimately makes its way onto the iPhone's settings, there will always be that disconnect of seeing the Bing search page on screen with a Google (or Yahoo) search box on the toolbar, just because the latter can be set as default while Bing can't. Assuming this means anyone bothers to use Bing on an iPhone at all.

Meanwhile, on the plus side there are a growing number of Apps for the iPhone dedicated to downloading the ever-changing wallpaper featured on Bing. Novelty aside, I suspect this might be more useful than most folks realize.