Live Labs, Gary Flake’s organization (under Ray Ozzie), has released a new mobile browser for Windows Mobile 5. Deepfish as it’s called. When a URL is called it is proxied through Live Labs servers and an image of the page is downloaded quickly. You are able to pan the page and select places to zoom in. As they warn on their site it does not support cookies or javascript.
Josh Bancroft has made a video comparing Deepfish to the existing (and pretty sad) Pocker IE that comes with Win Mobile 5.
Here’s a 17 minute video I shot today showing off Deepfish, a new mobile web browser from Microsoft’s “Live Labs”. The video shows how Deepfish doesn’t try to squash normal-sized web pages onto your mobile device’s screen, but instead lets you scroll and pan smoothly, and zoom in to the parts of the page you want to read.
I also compare Deepfish to the default Pocket IE browser that comes with all Windows Mobile devices, so you can see what really makes it different.
This is a beta/tech preview of Deepfish, so there are some rough edges, but it’s a very cool technology – similar to the mobile Safari browser that Steve Jobs showed off on the iPhone.
You can find out more about Deepfish, and sign up to be a tester at labs.live.com/Deepfish/. There’s also another video overview on Microsoft’s Channel 10.
This video was shot with my Canon XH A1 HDV camcorder at 1080i, then edited in Apple iMovie 6 HD and exported as a 320×240 Quicktime video file. It weighs in at 312 MB, and was cropped from 16:9 widescreen to standard 4:3 aspect ratio (and I chopped off the sides of some of the titles/credits in the process – oops!).
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Let me know what you think, or if you have any questions! I don’t have any affiliation with Microsoft, but I’ll be happy to help if I can.