Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Verizon Reverts to the Bad Old Days


I am stunned to learn that Verizon has replaced Goolge with Bing as the search engine on the Samsung Fascinate. While you can get google maps and GPS from the market all search including voice search can only be done through Bing. Bing on a Android phone as the only search option??? Only Verizon could stoop so low. It's a return to the days when Verizon would charge you 25 cents to eamil a photo from your phone (the only way to get a photo off the phone). Just to throw salt in the wound, they defaulted all Navigation functions to their paid service VZ navigator. I understand that it can be reset to google by going through lots of settings. This is just absurd. Hopefully the backlash will be enough that they don't try this BS again.

Update: Apparantly, Launcher Pro and ADW Launcher (you should be using one of these anyway) put the google search widget back. Not sure how this effects the rest of the Bing integration.

Update 2: According to users on the Fascinate Forum at Phandroid, Bing only uses the widget and the single tap search button. Voice search still uses google. When the Fascinate gets 2.2, users can download the google search widget. So in the end the only affect will be on the haptic search button using Bing (not long press voice search). Not a big deal for me as I never use it.

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