What comes to your mind if you would like to browse through satellite view of maps all over the world? Yes it’s Google Maps or Bing Maps which most of us are common with. So what comes to your mind if you would want a 3D satellite view of maps? It’s definitely going to be Google Earth as it is the most recommended and highly rated by the users. Looks like Microsoft’s Bing had been working real hard and finally launched their Bing Maps Preview which does almost everything that Google Earth is capable of.
Some of the key features that i would like to highlight :-
– Maps that has been captured using high definition aerial cameras together with hardware rendering done from a plane to the app which has already processed over 121 trillion pixels to build the 3D enviroment.
-They also feature “Streetside” which is supposed to be a feature similar to “Google Street View” . However, their area of coverage is still not wide as it’s main competitor, Google Street View. I would love to see how often does Microsoft update their streetside data as it is something vital in Mapping industry to some intense users.
-Bing Maps Preview also features “bubble view” which is also common in Google Earth where photos submitted from users around the world are gathered and matched into their database.
-Not to forget, it also has the in app searching function, where u can conduct a search for a restraunt or a particular location, where you could get a route overlay to the destination from the place you are at. This is similar to Google’s method of creating a route to a specific location where you could get direction from a specific place on the map itself. Bing Maps Preview offers traffic optimization as well when you create a route where it would show the estimated time and distance to reach the location that you wish to go and suggest a better route which has less traffic. Again, this is well known feature from few well known map navigation providers.
I would really recommend everyone who owns a device with Windows 8.1 installed to download and try this as it has a lot of potential to be one of the top mapping app in the years to come.