Earlier some blogs and websites reported that iPad accounts for almost 25.5% of mobile web browsing in the United States and almost 1% of all worldwide Internet browsing.
While these figures are impressive it also brings us to another area of mobile Internet usage, which is searching for information. Microsoft today announced a cool new version of its native application for the iPad which allows you to dump Apple’s native copy-paste feature. The new gesture is called ‘Lasso’ and what it actually does is that it lets you move your fingers in a circular fashion around a word that you might see and tap on it, to bring you results from Bing.
This negates the need to select words, tap, drag and press the button using iOS’s copy-paste tool and it also helps you avoid typing words into the search box. Bing group program manager Tony Chor claimed in a blog post that users can save up to 9 steps with Lasso and reduce the procedure to just 2 steps. Lasso would be available as an update to iPad’s Bing application later today. It certainly seems to be impressive as it reduces a lot of effort on the part of the user, but some of the questions remained unanswered.
It is not clear to me at this point of time if one could select a large sentence or phrase and tap on it using the Lasso feature to bring Bing results. Moreover, most of us use Google to search, and Bing hardly comes to our mind when we do web searches. Perhaps one could try using Bing just to use the Lasso feature as I must admit, that most of start searching for stuff from the content that we already see online. You could also read about Microsoft’s determined attempts at integrating Bing and Facebook.
