I always criticize that Bing Maps (http://maps.bing.com) is so bloody useless for Malaysian maps because they have ZERO street data on Malaysia. Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) become more useful a few years back when they finally added Malaysian maps data to their DB. So imagine my surprise when I loaded up Bing Maps today and saw....
And that was a BIG surprise for me, their map data looked more like street only data, let's compare it with Google Maps of the same area.
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Google has more of the localized building names, if you go to the full map you'll see that Digital Mall is marked on it already.
Routing is already supported on the maps so they obviously have real road data, though Bing Maps location DB is very very limited,
you can search for street names well enough, (My bad, while the street names do show up when you get driving instructions, you can't SEARCH for them yet) but buildings? Not so much, doesn't even know where One Utama is.
But it's a good start, at least it means someone actually cares enough to provide us with map data now. Also, I do like one simple little feature in Bing Maps which I just don't understand why Google Maps can't do properly.
For me to put a pin in a Bing Maps embed, all I had to do was right click in the map window and select "Place Pushpin Here!"
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Where as for Google Maps I had to right click and select What's Here BEFORE I even create the embed link, not to mention it brings in some additional search results as well. I understand that Google Maps's embed feature is very powerful, allowing you to include search results and other information on the embedded map, but they should realize that sometimes users just want to be able to tell people "X marks the spot!"
Other than the lack of location information, Bing Maps seems to have multiple map source images. After I discovered that the WEB was working I immediately tried using the Bing Mobile application on my phone, but alas, they were still getting the OLD useless maps like this.
Hopefully they'll synchronize and update the map DB before the launch of Windows Phone 7 here so we can actually have SOME sort of map application!