WebProNews

Weather, traffic conditions among the updates

Feedback from users of Microsoft's Live Search for Windows Mobile drove the introduction of several new features for the service.

They wanted easier access to weather reports and expanded traffic coverage. The Live Search team pushed out those and other new toys for people on Windows Mobile platforms.

Gary Voronel, program manager for Live Search for mobile, talked about some of the new arrivals, in a post at the Live Search blog. A click of the Weather icon now brings up a four-day forecast, along with current conditions, he noted.

"By far the most often-requested feature," he said.

Live Search of course does search on mobile, with the options for web, image, and other search types available to users. On the traffic side, Voronel cited Dallas, Indianapolis, and Baltimore among the cities added, courtesy of work done initially by Microsoft's Live Search Maps group.

He also said there were plenty of requests for access to personalized content from the mobile community, which the team helped deliver with connections to community generated content in their Virtual Earth Collections as well as searching (gasp!) Google KML.

Voronel said in a followup to a comment that the new features require the .NET Compact Framework 2. After installing that, the user can put the Windows Mobile 6 version of Live Search on the device.