Chronicles of a Windows Mobile User Gone iPhone: Day 5

Windows Mobile devices come with Pocket Internet Explorer - which does an elementary job at providing the internet experience on a mobile device. It doesn't support a lot of important web formats such as AJAX (in WM 5.0) and Flash, and navigation is cumbersome on large web pages.

There have been attempts at a better WM browser, but they all seem to leave something to be desired: there is Mozilla minimo, which added tabbed browsing, then there was Deepfish from Microsoft which added an interesting but possible un-useful zooming functionality, but since the beta as stopped, no one else can try it out; and then there was Opera Mini 4 beta which looked the most promising, but I still haven't gotten it to work right on my WM6 BlackJack.

The iPhone takes a brilliant approach to browsing the internet. When you load a web page, it starts with a fully zoomed out view, and, unlike PIE, it doesn't go to the mobile website if there is one (most tech blogs have a mobile version of their website that is formatted for small screens). Then, if you want to zoom in on a particular space, you can "pinch" the screen, or double tap on a particular area. Double tapping will focus on a column, as seen below in the second picture. Then, if you want to scroll around (note that there are no scroll bars on the iPhone), you tap and drag the page. The movement of the page is perfect; it's like sliding around a piece of paper on your desk.

In Windows Mobile, you can change the View option to "desktop" so that you can see the entire page, but then you have to scroll... A LOT, and on a slower device, this action can be cumbersome.

There are a few other things that Safari on the iPhone does that is different than WM. More on that next.

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