PC Magazine has a review of Windows Mobile 6.1, released today. “Windows Mobile 6.1, the latest upgrade to Microsoft’s main operating system for handhelds, has a few important invisible patches and a bunch of minor interface tweaks. It leaves all of Windows Mobile 6’s core strengths and weaknesses intact. On the positive side, Windows Mobile is still a flexible OS with unparalleled Windows and Exchange support, and the greatest number of handset choices by far. No matter which carrier, manufacturer, or form factor you choose, you’ll find a Windows Mobile device to suit your taste.” Update: Ars reports that Microsoft has announced a desktop-grade browser for Windows Mobile, scheduled for Q3 2008.
Better late than never I suppose.
I wonder if Apple will try porting Safari to Windows Mobile, like they did on the desktop. Probably not worth it. They want to sell hardware.
Well, the mobile firefox team better get their skates on then.
Unless the Windows Mobile phones had a comparable user experience to match that of the iPhone/iPod Touch, it’d be really silly at best to even try, not counting the fact that they’re not likely to port Safari to Windows Mobile for the same reason they won’t release OS X for the generic PC: it’d eat into their hardware sales.
What I believe really makes the biggest difference for Safari Mobile is the hardware it runs on for the interface: being able to zoom in whenever/wherever you want with multitouch, combined with the fact that it shows as much of the screen (terms of pixel-wise) as it does. The iPhone/iPod Touch screen resolution is 480*320, while most Windows Mobile phones are 320*240, or just half of it: this difference is notable in this context for usability. Still, it isn’t ideal on the iPhone for resolution, but that’s a reasonable tradeoff for something you can fit in your pocket and use as a phone, because people don’t change size.
Another thing that may make it more of a challenge to do Safari Mobile on Windows Mobile, which also may be a large part of what cripples the browsing experience on the other phones (not just Windows Mobile) is the amount of RAM the phone has: the iPhone comes with 128 Megs RAM standard, and a lot of mobile phones don’t have that much. Granted, a lot of that is filled up by OS X running, etc. so far less than that is available to other applications, but even after that, there tends to be more RAM left for other applications than most mobile phones have in total, and what you have with what’s available with OS X for frameworks/pre-existing API makes it much like the original Mac, but far better, in that it is highly leveragable (is that a valid word? Oh, whatever!) which means applications don’t need to incorporate as much for all the nice GUI each time. Perhaps Windows Mobile has a comparable GUI SDK and such available, but you’d likely need to have some API translation layer between the native Safari Mobile code and that on Windows Mobile, to some degree, and that would end up requiring more RAM that’s not there on most Windows Mobile phones. Sure, there are some phones out that have more RAM and higher screen resolution, but not many.
And then, there’s a bigger financial reason you can see, outside of the immediate hardware sales: best information available indicates Apple gets a certain amount of revenue each month from the contracts, not sure what the number is: other than the hardware sales and profits, they keep getting recurring pure profit, which they’d not get from porting Safari Mobile elsewhere, so what would make Apple even *think* it was a remotely good idea?
There’s already a couple of ports of Webkit (the core of Safari) for Windows Mobile. http://www.wake3.com/ is about to enter a closed beta, while you can already download the beta of Torch Mobile at http://www.torchmobile.com/.