Microsoft is breaking the mold, throwing it out the window and running it over with a car with its upcoming mobile operating system. If you need any evidence that Windows Mobile 6.5 isn’t all that different versions of Windows CE that were released nearly 10 years ago, all you need to do is check out Pocket Internet Explorer, which is possibly one of the worst mobile web browsers available today. It’s slow, difficult to navigate, and doesn’t worth support many modern web standards.
But Windows Phone 7′s new web browser actually looks pretty nice. Pocketnow’s Brandon Miniman took an LG demo unit running Windows Phone 7 and compared the web browser performance to that of an iPhone 4 and Google Nexus One. And while the LG phone loaded some web sites more slowly and doesn’t support HTML5 or Flash, for the most part, the browsing experience is very similar to what you can expect from the other state of the art phones.
Web pages load reasonably quickly. You can zoom by double-tapping the screen or pinching two fingers together. And scrolling is very smooth. Overall, it looks like the Windows Phone 7 browser is among the best available for a mobile device — even though the test was conducted using pre-release software on a developer-only phone which may never be available for purchase.
I am waiting to figure out which new phone I want to go with, my contract has been up for a while. I was leaning towards the iPhone 4 but with it’s issues decided to wait. I was told by someone “in the know” that the new Microsoft powered phones coming out would be well worth waiting for……sounds like this review pretty much backs that up.
bah… WP (Windows Pff!) is ugly!