When playing around in Windows Phone 7 I noticed that the Bing Maps functionality has a very nice and fast way to calculate a route from the point where you are by pressing the Directions button. (Your current location is determined by the A-GPS sensor in your WP7 device.) When calculating the route you have the choice to calculate a route driven by a car, or for walking. Also finding a location on the map works easy by pressing the Find button and type a location or just speak to your phone to find it 
. When selecting details of the calculated route it smoothly zooms to the selected location. Very nice done.
“Current location on Bing Maps”
Normally I don’t use navigation a lot, but on my last vacation I was kind of lost the way back to my vacation home. I thought no problem at all, get my WP7 phone, start Bing Maps and voila find the route back home. WRONG…… Bing Maps was starting up and my current location was found within seconds, but there was no way to calculate a route or find a location on the map. The directions button was just disappeared. And when I tried to find a location, it only searches the internet and not the map. After a few tries Idecided to pickup my hardcopy map and navigate my way back on the ‘old school’ way. At that moment I was thinking that I did something wrong or that the internet connection wasn’t stable enough to calculate the route.
“Details of the calculated route on Bing Maps”
Back home I gave it another few tries, but without luck. Than I start thinking what settings do I have changed since I got my device. After a while I found out that I have changed the region settings from English to Netherlands. I have reverted this change, restarted my device and yes…….my directions button is back again.
I took the following steps to get my Directions and Find functionality back on the Bing Maps:
1. Go to Settings
2. Open Region & Language
3. Change Browser & search language to English (United States)
4. Click on the link on top of the screen to accept the changes and restart your device.
I think that this functionality is only available in the languages in which WP7 is official launched. I will update this settings back to Netherlands when WP7 is officially launched in the Netherlands.
