Blog Post: Learn How to Use the Location Feature in Bing On Your BlackBerry Smartphone

Bing has some great features for BlackBerry smartphone users. We often get asked by users how to make the most of the Bing app on their phone. Using the location settings in Bing helps you get search results using Bing that are based on where you are in real-time. Today we are going to cover how to use this feature.

Setting Your Current Location in Bing

There are two ways to set your current location in Bing: let Bing detect your location using location services like GPS; or, manually set your location by searching from the “change location” screen.

1. Location Detection

When you first launch Bing app, a dialog box will ask permission to allow Bing to access and store your location. When you select allow at this prompt, Bing checks to see if location services are enabled on your device. If the location services are not enabled on your BlackBerry device you will need to manually set them by: on your BlackBerry device go to Options -> Device -> Location Settings -> set the Location services to “Location On”. Once enabled, Bing will try and get your current location.

            

If you cancel the dialog, Bing will not try to get your location and will instead use its default setting of “New York City.” Now if you’re not in NYC this might not give you the best local search results. You can trigger location detection manually by following these steps:

1. On Bing home screen, click “Set a location >” link
2. On change location screen, click ‘Use my location’
3. If the dialog “Allow Bing to access and store your location…” appears, click Allow
4. Turn on the location services on the device if prompted

Bing will try to acquire your current location and once detected the location label would be shown below the search textbox.

                              

             

2. Searching the Location

Searching the location is great to use if you want to manually set your current location. To do so:

1. On Bing home screen, click the location link below the search textbox
2. On change location screen, type the address in the text box and press enter

After completing the search, you should see the location set to yours. Now when you search for any local intent query like “pizza hut” or “Starbucks”, business results near that location will be displayed under the Local tab.

   

– Bing for BlackBerry Team

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