One of the features we did not hear about yesterday at the Windows Phone Mango announcement was turn-by-turn GPS navigation support in Bing Maps. Luckily a developer named SharpGIS has discovered the feature in the new developer tools and has posted a YouTube video of the feature as seen below. Without real WP7 hardware to provide a GPS fix, the Windows Phone Developer Tools let the user manually feed the Bing navigation app coordinates. As a result, movement is jerkier than you’d experience when trying this on a real smartphone running Mango, and the software can’t very accurately judge speed, neither of which should be an issue in real-world use.
You’ll notice it’s very similar to a normal directions command except as you move along the route, there will now be speech updates directing you which way to go. You’ll also hear about it when you’ve made a wrong turn, but unfortunately it sounds like you have to tap the screen in order to recalculate a new route. The feature seems pretty basic and simple, but maybe that’s a good thing since it also seems pretty easy to use.
Yes, we realize that turn-by-turn navigation is nothing new for most smartphones, but this is at least one thing Windows Phone 7 users can look forward to this fall. Hopefully it will support multi-tasking and will announce turns even while accessing another program in the forground.
Source: Twitter via Mary Jo Foley
Originally published on Pocketnow on May 25, 2011.