Bing just announced a new version of the free Bing Application for the iPhone that fixes a number of stability and usability issues.

The new version is only available currently on the US version of iTunes and over a million downloads have already been racked up.

I’ve had the fortune of using Bing on my iPhone and its actually quite a cool looking application and does what it promises. Its interesting to see where this goes especially given the fact that Google and Apple are going head to head with their respective phones. Bing just may become the default search engine on the iPhone.

For me as a consumer, this in combination with Google Apps meets most if not all my needs on my iPhone.

In addition, they have added additional features such as:

• Ability to bookmark maps, sites, businesses and weather.
• Sharing of results via email
• Copy and Paste is now supported within the application
• Search settings and Search history
• Support for all versions of iPod Touch

You can get Bing for the iPhone via the following iTunes Link

While ITunes as an application makes it easy to move music from your computer to your iPod or iPhone, Apple has made it intentionally difficult to move the other way back.

There are many reasons why you may wish to copy the contents of your iPhone across to your PC. I recently installed Windows 7 on my main machine and am now facing the possibility of having my music collection wiped and restarting from fresh. This is a daunting task as I always keep my music library as tidy as possible so that I can locate and play my music quickly and easily.

Thankfully, there are many third party products out there that can back up your music collection straight from your iPod/iPhone to your PC. I ended up using SharePod because it was simple to use, uncomplicated and best of all FREE.

In order to back up all or selected songs, follow the steps below:

Step 1

Download the application from here: http://www.getsharepod.com/download/

Click on Download and save the application into a folder on your machine. Extract the contents into a folder.

Step 2

Plug in your iPhone via USB and double click on SharePod.exe to start the application.

Note: If you do not have your IPhone connected to the machine when you start SharePod, you will get a dialog box as below:

In this case, hit OK to exit the application, plug your IPhone in and restart the application.

Step 3

When the application starts, it will scan your IPhone and display all the songs on it.

Step 4

Select the songs you want to back up (Select all songs if you want to back up all the songs) and click on Copy to PC on the main toolbar. You will get a dialog box as below:

If you want to import the music automatically into ITunes as well, then ensure the “Import my music to ITunes” is checked. However, if you do that, ENSURE ITUNES IS NOT RUNNING.

The dialog box is divided into two sections. The top section has a browse location as to where the tracks will be saved. The bottom section has 4 presets as to how SharePod will name the track files. The last option on the bottom right is if you are not happy with the presets and want to do some custom naming.

Step 5

Once you are happy with your selection, hit OK and the copy will begin immediately.

Once all the tracks have completed copying, you can find them on your machine. The copy process can take a while if you have selected a lot of songs. For the example below, I selected only a few to show the process.

If you have selected to import the songs into your ITunes, you can also find them there too:

That’s pretty much how to copy individual songs onto your PC. If you select Backup iPod, it will back up all your songs as well as your Playlists to your PC and/or ITunes.

SharePod has an excellent site that details more instructions on getting the best out of the application as well as a comprehensive help and forum section. You can do a lot more with this application including exporting photos and copying tracks back into the IPod. However, my needs were just to move my ITunes library from my Vista machine to my new Windows 7 machine and for this task, it was excellent!

I would recommend this product to anyone who needs a simple copying application that is free to use. It hasn’t got the frills of some of the commercial applications out there, but serves its purpose well.

In addition to the application itself, SharePod also has a .Net library that is available to all developers who wishes to use it as a wrapper to create their own applications. I’ve already downloaded SharePodLib and am looking forward to seeing what I can do with it!

If you try and install iTunes 8.2 or above on Windows Server 2003, you will most likely get an issue during the install where it complains during installation of one of the components (namely, Apple Mobile Device Support). The error looks like “Apple mobile device support requires that your computer is running Windows XP SP2 or newer”.

iTunes will complete its install, but when you plug in your iPhone or iPod, it will not get recognized and as such, won’t allow you to synch.

If you are having difficulty getting your IPhone or IPod recognized by Windows Server 2003, try the following:

Step 1

Download iTunes Setup as usual from the Apple site. Don’t install it at the moment. If you have already installed it, then don’t worry. Follow the rest of the steps through as normal.

Step 2

Open the following location in your web browser:
http://bit.ly/ItunesForWin2k3

That is my personal SkyDrive account and has two files in it. One is the MSI file for the Apple Mobile Device Support for iTunes 8.2 and the other is an .mst file (I found the MST file on the web – thanks to whoever set it up!). Download both of these into a folder on your PC. In my case below, I’ve created a folder on my c drive called ITunes and downloaded both files there:

Step 3

Open a command prompt window and type the following (with an enter after each line):

cd c:\itunes
msiexec /i AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi TRANSFORMS=w2k3.mst

When you hit enter on the second line, it should start the install process. This will install the Apple Mobile Device Support service on Windows 2003 Server.

Step 4

The last step is now to install ITunes as normal. If you had already installed iTunes, you can re-run the set up and select Repair to re-install the application.

Once complete, you should be able to start iTunes and when you plug in your iPod or iPhone, it should get discovered and displayed in your iTunes

That should be it :) I know the instructions are quite sparse. I’d love to hear any comments you may have around this. If you need me to elaborate on any step further, please let me know.