The things that come up during bed time web browsing can be interesting. Tonight, instead of reading up on the happenings of the day I came across something more interesting than articles on the web, a Bing Mobile site redesign. The above video is a screencast coming straight from my Droid Incredible, using the ShootMe app. It shows what I found to be my homepage when I fired up my browser to visit Techmeme. When I tried to visit m.bing.com on my Zune HD, while on the same wi-fi connection as my phone, I reached the old mobile site.

I believe most of the jerkiness you see is a possible combination of my manually underclocked phone and the app I used as the site performed relatively smoothly on my phone. In making the video I was sure to scroll slowly, as not to exacerbate any issues with choppiness. One point of lag I came across was the loading of the picture grid as I scrolled down for new images. I should note that individual pictures had zooming animations as they loaded from the picture grid. Another slowdown was with the maps section of the site. While the map only got larger without adding detail, when I used the pinch to zoom motion, I can assure you that better quality road maps do load if you chose to have the map pinpoint your location. At one point the site appeared to become unresponsive, when I refreshed the page items loaded again. Not featured in the video is what happens when you enter a search query. That interface has been refined as well. While entering your search auto-suggestions effortlessly pop-up. Similar to the Movies and Weather sections, there is a context aware topic ribbon below the search bar and above the results linking you to relevant searches of your original search in other categories such as news, shopping, and images. If your search does not include any content in any of the aforementioned categories it does not get included as an option you can select.

Looking at the design cues of this new Bing Mobile, the Zune HD experience comes to mind. Imagining a singular device dedicated to search, if I could swipe to a second column featuring items such as my recent search phrases, images, and movies titles I queried, the similarity would be complete. The iconic image of the day still remains. Though, it looks like Bing has departed from its app and desktop web strategy of hiding interesting search boxes along with its image of the day. In a good way white backgrounds and radio buttons give-way black backgrounds and highlighted words to indicate settings. This text-heavy mobile interpretation of its search site is still finger friendly. I would say, and the video does evidence this, the mobile site has become more finger friendly as scrolling and swiping of larger finger targets make selecting a product or image  easier and (if image scrolling speed increases) more engaging. While certain elements of this redesign may already be present the current version of Bing Mobile, the UI has not looked this enticing and unified for all of the mobile site.

Update: I have added some pictures to exemplify the sections not featured in the video. As for mapping, zooming in is a double tap affair, while pinching to zoom simply enlarges the zoom stage you are currently on. Secondly, the image search boxes are still there. You need to tap on the negative space around the mobile site categories to make today’s search boxes appear.