Browse the web with Internet Explorer Mobile.

• Tap Start > Internet Explorer to launch a web browser.
• Double-tap on a page to zoom in.
• Tap the circle in the lower-right corner to display browser controls, such as full screen, zoom, pan, and favourites.
• Access your Favourites from the Star icon.
• View Flash* videos and shop online for a richer web experience.

* Flash functionality requires Adobe Flash Lite player, which may not be available on all devices.

At yesterdays MWC conference, Microsoft revealed an expected update to Windows Mobile, now up to 6.5, available later in the year. Changes include a revamp of the home screen, considerations in the interface for touch usage as well as tweaking the way user access features. One such example is the new locked home screen where icons are displayed for emails or missed called and voicemails; users swipe the icon of the feature they wish to access which unlocks the device and takes the user immediately to the chosen function. Behind the new home screen and menu icons are still the same old looking interface menus with the device status icons along the top, Windows menu and close button.

The menu screen sees a change to the layout of the icons from grid to a honeycomb to improve access using fingers. Separation of the icons helps users with sausage fingers and no access to Homer Simpson’s dialling wand.

Changes to Internet Explorer Mobile claim improved rendering on the go offering a desktop quality rendering.

With the mobile phone carrying lots of important information, contacts, emails, messages, pictures, notes, documents etc, the potential of losing it all either through a software problem or losing the device altogether is ever present. Microsoft announced My Phone, a service to add to the number of mobile data backup services. Direct regular backups from the handset to the service can be setup. Storage will be around 200Mb and the data can be pulled back down to a new handset.

To add to the service aspect, Microsoft also announced a software marketplace, a central repository of applications, utilities and games. Nothing new here but as with Apple’s and Nokia’s upcoming marketplace, users will only have to look in one place for the majority of their needs.

Finally, Microsoft unveiled Recite, available as a free technology preview. It allows users to record voice notes and then to search them with their voice. No need to fumble around the menus and type your thoughts, just set Recite as a shortcut and talk away! Available for Windows phones, version 6.0 onwards.

tags: Microsoft, MWC 2009, mobile world congress, conference, Barcelona, Recite, Windows Mobile, Internet Explorer Mobile, My Phone, backup, marketplace

After eighteen months, I got a weekend free to write my own code, and hence continues my series on avoiding some major gottcha’s in WM coding.

One of the major frustrations you would hit is the webbrowser control. There are many scenarios when you want a formatted text based UX, or a flow-style UX where the WebBrowser control comes in pretty handy. However, here are a few things you should know before you start coding – lest you end up investing months of effort and finding out you won’t get the “exact” same effect as you hoped for.

All in all, it’s an amazing component that at times you will be very very thankful they included.

1. Most of the COM Interfaces that allow extensibility on the desktop aren’t supported on the phone (duh!). Most specifically the ones you’ll miss are the IDocHostUIHandler (preventing you from overloading the context menu), and IInternetSecurityManager (preventing you from implementing your own security zone/settings).

2. The DOM elements are specially made-for-mobile COM classes which are named IPIEHTML* instead of the IHTML*. Your Anchor would be IPIEHTMLAnchorElement (or somethign like that). There isn’t any documentation on these so don’t waste time hunting. Instead open up webvw.idl found in one of the sdk include paths and you’ll be able to figure out what does what.

3. DHTML is *NOT* supported. Many people repeatedly try to modify formatting/style of elements in a generated page. The precise and unambigious answer is “it cannot be done”. Don’t waste time trying. Having said that, the IPIEHTMLControlElement derivatives support some on-the-fly modification such as setting/modifing text in text boxes, or editing of lists, and disabling/enabling controls.

4. Some features not supported on desktop are actually supported on the mobile control. Some esoteric CSS pseudoclasses such as :focus which don’t work on desktop IE, work perfectly on pocket IE. You can make some really cool effects by changing formatting when a control is focussed – especially on smartphones where the dotted-line focus highlight can be too thin to notice and you might want to add a little more jazz to your links. In this case, there’s an undocumented CSS extension called x-focus-border which when set to none will get rid of the focus rectangle (found this in the comments section of the IE Mobile Blog).

5. If you’re using Document->Write to insert HTML into the control from your app, then note that the DocumentComplete event is not guaranteed to be fired. I found no documentation on this yet, but I’ve seen the symptom a few times. I admit that I may be doing something wrong here, but it’s something worth keeping in mind if you’re going to rely on that. Ensure you test this out with your pages first. To be more specific, when I didn’t put a background picture for the page, I didn’t get this event. When I did put a background picture, the event fires consistently as expected. The workaround, of course, is to put a dummy one-pixel white image as background.

That’s all I can think of for now. Will post more regularly on avoiding various gottchas that can end up saving a lot of time when developing for WM, if you know what to look out for.

I was recently asked how I debug JavaScript code executing on Internet Explorer Mobile. First things first you need to configure Internet Explorer Mobile to show JavaScript Errors. As noted here you need to:

Change the Registry setting “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main” and Create a new DWORD key under Main with the name “ShowScriptErrors“. Set dword value of 1

There are (at least) two ways to change registry settings on a Windows Mobile device/emulator. Firstly you can use the Remote Registry Editor (Start|Microsoft Visual Studio 2005|Visual Studio Remote Tools) that comes with Visual Studio. Alternatively you can install a registry editing application on the device, for example PHM Registry Editor.

Once you’ve restarted Internet Explorer Mobile it should start showing JavaScript errors. This and good old alert() are really all the tools you have at your disposal to do debugging. There is no way (that I know off) to attach to the JavaScript engine running on the Windows Mobile device and do remote debugging. In fact this is a problem for most if not all embedded browsers. 

One thing you can do is leverage XMLHttpRequest (XHR) to log messages to a remote server, sometimes useful when you need to log more information than will easily fit in an alert() dialog box on a cramped Windows Mobile display.

Las Vegas (USA) – Nel tentativo di tenere il passo di concorrenti sempre più aggressivi, a cui di recente si è aggiunta Apple con il proprio iPhone, Microsoft ha rilasciato un aggiornamento per Windows Mobile for Smartphone e ha annunciato una futura e più sofisticata versione di Internet Explorer Mobile. BigM afferma che Windows Mobile 6.1 include numerose migliorie suggerite dalla comunità di utenti, tra le quali una più efficace gestione dei messaggi, tool di configurazione più semplici e intuitivi, funzionalità ottimizzate per i piccoli display, e più efficienti strumenti dedicati alla sicurezza.

Secondo Microsoft, sono almeno cinque le ragioni per aggiornare o acquistare un nuovo smartphone basato su Windows Mobile 6.1:
- la nuova modalità di gestione degli SMS, che ora adotta una visuale ordinata in base alle conversazioni, in stile instant messaging;
- diverse ottimizzazioni pensate per gli smartphone privi di display touchscreen, come la possibilità di eseguire operazioni di copia e incolla; - una schermata Home dotata di un pannello scorrevole che mette meglio in evidenza le attività e gli appuntamenti del giorno e permette di accedere con un solo clic ai propri contenuti preferiti (musica, video, foto ecc.);
- una più potente funzionalità di sincronizzazione dei dati con il proprio laptop o PC;
- un tool di configurazione delle reti wireless più semplice (ora contenuto in una sola schermata) e generalmente in grado di connettere il dispositivo ad una WLAN con un solo clic.Tra le altre novità si citano poi il wizard Started Center per la configurazione semplificata di posta elettronica e connessioni Bluetooth, una versione aggiornata di IE, un più completo task manager, e un’interfaccia con look and feel più simile a quello di Windows Vista.Windows Mobile 6.1 supporta infine l’appena lanciato System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008, un software che consente agli amministratori IT aziendali di gestire a distanza e in modo centralizzato gli smartphone dei dipendenti, configurandone anche le policy di sicurezza. “Il supporto per System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 aiuta gli amministratori IT a gestire i dispositivi mobili in maniera analoga a un PC Windows oppure ad accedere in totale sicurezza alle informazioni aziendali residenti dietro un firewall”, spiega Microsoft. “Inoltre, il supporto per Exchange Server 2007 SP1 con policy avanzate dedicate al mobile consente alle aziende di gestire la sicurezza dei telefoni e al contempo di offrire ai loro utenti la possibilità di cercare, condividere e utilizzare informazioni in qualsiasi luogo si trovino”. I primi smartphone basati sulla nuova versione di Windows Mobile dovrebbero arrivare sul mercato già entro l’estate. Alcuni modelli basati sulla versione 6.0 potranno essere aggiornati dagli utenti gratuitamente o a pagamento. Nel terzo trimestre dell’anno Microsoft ha poi in piano il rilascio di una nuova versione di Internet Explorer Mobile, capace di supportare le tecnologie Flash, Silverlight e H.264. Il big di Redmond sostiene che il rinnovato browser fornirà un’esperienza di navigazione quanto più simile a quella fornita da un browser desktop, visualizzando una grande varietà di contenuti in stile Web 2.0. Tra le nuove funzionalità si trova anche una modalità di navigazione a pieno schermo, che consentirà di sfruttare l’intero display del telefono cellulare.

Στο προηγούμενό μου post σας μίλησα για τη νέα έκδοση των Windows Mobile που παρουσιάστηκε κατά τη διάρκεια της CTIA 2008. Κατά τη διάρκεια του ίδιου γεγονότος, παρουσιάστηκε και μια βελτιωμένη έκδοση του Internet Explorer Mobile. Προσοχή! Δεν μιλάω για τον Internet Explorer που περιέχουν τα νέα Windows Mobile 6.1. Πρόκειται για μια καινούρια βελτιωμένη έκδοση του Internet Explorer που διορθώνει προβλήματα και φέρνει πολύ σημαντικές αλλαγές. Ο ενημερωμένος Internet Explorer παρέχει υποστήριξη για Adobe Flash, για το Silverlight της Microsoft και H.264 streaming.

H νέα έκδοση του Internet Explorer Mobile αναμένεται για το τρίτο τετράμηνο του 2008.