Test new IE Mobile 6 on a free emulator for VS 2008

What will customers with Windows Mobile phones be doing with your application, and how will they perceive your Web site, with the upcoming 6.1.4 release? The latest round of emulator images can answer those questions.

Microsoft has been promising an improved mobile browsing experience for users of Windows Mobile phones, especially those with touchscreens. Now, if you have an application you're developing for the latest edition, Microsoft is making available the latest images of Windows Mobile 6.1.4 for use with the built-in emulator in Visual Studio 2008.

What's important about this is, version 6.1.4 is the first to include Internet Explorer Mobile 6, which Microsoft promises to feature "desktop-quality" rendering.

We tested Microsoft's image of the Professional edition of IE Mobile 6 (carriers will have a choice between Standard and Professional distributions) on a handful of emulated handsets, including a 240 x 320, a 240 x 400, and a dream screen of 480 x 800. In either of the smaller resolutions, for best results, you'll want to switch to landscape mode. On Microsoft's emulated phone, you touch the App Launch 2 key to flip sideways.

Despite everything that marketing tells you, it's just plain difficult to render a complete Web page width on a 400-pixel display or less. What you would reasonably expect, though, is for a zoomed out Web page to look proportionately accurate, so you can more easily zoom in to segments that you can read up close. I've found Opera Mini to do a fairly respectable job of this on my BlackBerry 8830, though the experience is nowhere near "desktop-quality."

IE Mobile 6's effort is also fairly respectable, given the circumstances. BetaNews, you'll have already noticed, is not the widest page already, so fitting the image of it in a 320-pixel frame may be easier for our page than for most others. On our emulator, at least, our front page text looked semi-legible, provided you're wearing good, clean glasses.

You'll also get a chance to experiment with the on-screen keyboard, which represents what a Windows Mobile user may actually wrestle with, at near-actual size. Certainly nobody's fingers are this small, and it's at this point where I truly appreciate tactile keyboards like on the Samsung Q or a BlackBerry. In IE Mobile 6, the address bar does its best to complete the URL you're trying to type, to save you as many keystrokes as possible.

It's at moments like these that the mobile browsing experience truly does resemble the desktop browsing experience.

By default, IE Mobile 6 renders pages with a 1-to-1 pixel ratio, which means you'll often be looking at the upper left corner of the display. There are familiar scroll bars if you're using the pointer; and if your touchscreen is working, then a click-and-drag on the emulator also repositions your focus. Zooming out is fairly intuitive: You touch Menu, then from the popup, touch Zoom Out. That gives you a full-width representation of the active page, and just like in Opera Mini, you scoot the focus frame with the scrollbars or with a drag operation. The Zoom In button on-screen takes you a little closer, not too much.

So no, it's not "desktop-quality" by any means just yet; but given the constraints you have to work under, the objective of the browser should be to annoy the user as little as possible. To that end, there appears to be a problem: Let's say this isn't a touchscreen for a moment, and that we're using the rocker switch to move around instead. If you really want to read the Web page, you will have flipped the display to landscape mode. But the function of your rocker switch (at least in this emulator) does not change with it; as a result, what was "Right" before stays "Right," even though from this angle, you might think it should be "Down;" and what was "Up" stays "Up" even though it looks like "Right."

If your rocker switch is the only means to utilize your on-screen keyboard, this can become a serious headache. Perhaps WM 6.1 device manufacturers have already solved it in the real world; if not, perhaps Microsoft should give some thought to this.

Though the emulator images require Visual Studio 2008 for installation, you don't have to be in VS 2008 to run them. We were able to launch our emulators straight from the desktop on our XP SP3-based test system.