Here’s the latest nugget of MID news that I think many people were expecting. Microsoft will attempt to bring ‘desktop grade’ browsing to WM7.
“..they will try to bring IE up to par with the iPhone’s Safari browser, and deliver “desktop grade” browsing with zooming and scaling and all that good stuff. ” [Gizmodo]
About flippin time I say! Although I hope its not all zooming and scaling and that there’s some native 800×480 support in there.
In addition, they will work on the media apps and UI. This has been a major problem with WM for a long time and should help to re-direct the platform more towards consumers. WM currently has the same issue as the N810. It needs a bit of time, money and knowledge to get the best out of it and that’s not really what most consumers want. Take the iPhone and EeePC – they just work!
Microsoft will try and raise the bar for performance too and eventually, re-write all the back-end data passing between apps for WM8. Just like Google’s android is doing in the back end.
As for timescales, well if we assume/guess that 6.1 is going to be announced and available at CES (I haven’t heard anything about this tho) and that they will also announce a timetable for WM7, I’d say we could be looking towards the end of 2008. Thats about the same time as Ubuntu Mobile and Android will be maturing. And also about the same time as Menlow, Mobile-ITX, ARM Cortex and AMD’s mobile offerings.
Shake it all up with some cool designs and there’s going to be a huge amount of full-on fighting action in the MID marketplace!
Love it!
More comment and tidbits at Gizmodo.
