WMPoweruser.com

Posts Tagged ‘6on6’

Microsoft is set to announce th availability of IE6 on the China Mobile Samsung Omnia today at the Mobile Asia Congress being held in Macau.

Scott Rockfeld, Microsoft’s director of Windows Mobile, mobile communications business, told ZDNet Asia over the phone Tuesday that China Mobile was chosen as the first operator to get mobile IE6 because the Microsoft hopes to tap the vast growth in the number of new mobile users in the country.

“We want to have users in [emerging markets] get their first online experience with Windows Mobile,” he said. “Our target is not to convert existing users of the competing phones like the iPhone or Google’s Android. We want to grow faster than the market.

Rockfeld said Microsoft has brought the “full rendering engine of IE6 to the phone”, which is expected to deliver a surfing experience on the mobile that is closer to that of the desktop. Users can also view rich elements such as flash “straight from the browser”, he said.

Whether the browser will replace the pre-installed Opera Mobile 9.5 browser is unknown.

Source:ZDNet Asia

GadgetMix has reviewed Internet Explorer 6 Mobile running on the HTC Touch Diamond, and while he praises the rendering quality there were still issues on some sites, however the main complaint was that IE6 was just much too slow to be usable, which is not far from the label already attached to Pocket IE.

While this news is disappointing the implications are not that far reaching, due to the availability of a number of other browsers on the Windows Mobile platform better optimized to the hardware. It does however reflect rather poorly on Microsoft. While they claimed IE6 Mobile will run better on future hardware, we know that they are developing on the HTC Touch Pro, which has the same processor as the Touch Diamond, so its unlikely that they themselves are experiencing better performance.

Read the full review at Gadgetmix.com

MSMobiles has published this video of IE6 Mobile showing the functionality of the browser.

While is shows full desktop like rendering it cant help but lament the wasted screen real estate on scroll bars, softkeys and status bars, unlike my favourite Opera Mobile.

Read more at MSMobiles.com

Internet Explorer 6 Mobile is inching ever closer to release, with the Windows Mobile Team Blog announcing the availability of emulator images of Windows Mobile 6.1.4 containing the updated browser.

What has been more interesting is the feature set announced with it:

• Improved fidelity (support for full fidelity desktop rendering)
• Layout fixes to accommodate a mobile screen (text wrap)
• Enhanced Script and AJAX support (Jscript v5.7 from Internet Explorer 8)
• Improved multimedia experience (Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 for Adobe Flash content)
• Deeper integration with search
• Enhanced cursor navigation model
• Touch and gesture support – pan support
• Multiple zoom levels
• Easy switching between mobile / desktop versions of sites by specifying UA strings.

So for people who have been particularly concerned about the quality of IE6 in today’s AJAX world, it seems those concerns are unfounded, with IE8’s javascript engine backported to IE6 Mobile.

What many people do not know is that Windows Mobile desktop emulators run native ARM code on an emulated processor, meaning the code can often be removed from the emulator and run directly on devices.

This being the case, I don’t think it will be long before IE6 Mobile is available in cab form from our favourite developer haunt.

Download the emulator images while its hot from Microsoft here.