Microsoft takes aim at mobile browsing with Deepfish

Hoping, perhaps, to compete with the iPhone's cool "pinching" interface, Microsoft has taken the wraps off of its own solution for handheld web browsing, called (oddly enough) Deepfish. Microsoft's goal was to allow Windows Mobile users to browse full web pages instead of scaled down versions--without sacrificing speed or requiring endless scrolling. Deepfish will display a full web page on your Windows Mobile device and allows you to zoom in on various parts of the page using your joystick. The software accomplishes this by creating a static image of the web page that it uses as a map; the downside of this is that no dynamic content is supported. Gary William Flake, director of Microsoft's Live Labs explained that mobile browsing is "often less than intuitive, the pages don't look like what you've come to expect on the desktop and it takes a long time for a page to load. Deepfish aims to solve that problem." Deepfish is available from Microsoft Live Labs for a limited time, so if you're aching for a new mobile browsing interface, head on over.

For more on Deepfish:
- see this EarthTimes.org article
- for screenshots, scope this Engadget article
- and download Deepfish from Microsoft's website