Thursday, March 29, 2007

Deepfish - Enhanced Browsing For Your Mobile

Microsoft announced Deepfish this morning, a new mobile browsing technology from their labs group. It's a small, downloadable app for Windows smart phone users that presents Web content the same way you'd see it on your computer's Web browser. If you've seen the mobile version of Apple's Safari on the upcoming iPhone, you have an idea of how Deepfish works.

Deepfish is designed like an array of photo thumbnails. To zoom into a section you want to see in more detail, you just select it with a magnify box controlled by your phone's directional pad, or pointer. If you want to zoom back out, the original version of the page will still be loaded in your phone's memory cache--which should save a considerable amount of time (and data usage).
In our brief hands-on with it today, we noticed a few quirks. It's a little slow, mostly due to Microsoft re-routing each page through its servers for re-sizing. Also, it won't re-columnize the content like most mobile browsers do, requiring users to scroll back and forth to read anything wider than about a hundred pixels. We'll cut Microsoft some slack since it's a currently just a technology demo, but for regular use it's pretty cumbersome.

Deepfish is an important new development in mobile Web browsing. It's an exciting prospect for people who want to browse on their phones without having to remember mobile addresses, or rely on developers to create mobile versions of their site.

Deepfish is currently in private beta. Microsoft is limiting the amount of downloads to a "first come, first served" basis, so grab it here while you can.

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