Back in March, Microsoft announced the release of a limited public beta of their new mobile browsing platform through the Live .com Labs division of the Redmond giant. The application aims to bring the desktop browsing experience to the mobile platform by offering fully-rendered versions of a webpage within the Deep Fish browser.

We were included in the beta release and had a chance to preview the Deep Fish experience on our mobile platforms here at Azul 7. First impressions were, unfortunately, not good.

Installing the Application

As heavy smartphone users, we expect mobile applications to have installation routines that can be accessed through a mobile device. Not so with Deep Fish. Though they offer access outside of ActiveSync to the installation files, there was just enough Javascript on the page to confuse Internet Explorer and not trigger the download of the file to the phone. So, installation was handled by downloading the file to the desktop, sending it as an attachment via email, then downloading the attachment through Mobile Outlook.

After saving the file on the phone, installation is fairly straightforward. As most Windows Mobile users will know, simply click the CAB file, and installation begins. Because we like to keep our system memory free to run core system processes, the app was installed on the micro SD expansion card.

Activating the Application

As part of the public beta, Microsoft issued activation keys that must be entered the first time to activate the product. Even with a full QWERTY keyboard on our Cingular 8525’s, entering a 16 digit activation number was a bit much. Microsoft could’ve saved a lot of user frustration by putting the activation routine on the front end of the Deep Fish process, requiring that activation codes are entered via the website and not through the application itself.

Finally - Starting Up Deep Fish

After entering the activation code, the next thing we saw was a plain, white screen. No “Success!” message - just a plain, white screen. Poking around the menus we finally found an option that enabled us to enter a URL, but there was no clear direction within the application itself of what to do next after starting it up.

Visiting a Site

Typically, Microsoft products tend to favor one another, so we went over to MSNBC.com. After entering the URL in the address bar and pressing the enter key on the 8525’s keyboard, there was another white screen. Thinking that we’d done something wrong, we entered the URL again, but had the same result - plain white screen. No status indicator or progress bar - just a white screen (common theme, this white screen).

Here’s where the EDGE network speeds of Cingular/ATT’s network really begin to bog down. EDGE is perfectly fine with email, but for graphic intensive applications (even with the smallest of graphics), speeds are reduced to a crawl. Though there were events happening behind the scenes in Deep Fish, the slow network coupled with the lack of progress indicators left a giant question mark on our faces as we kept watching the screen to see if anything would show up.

Part of the difficulties in seeing a fully rendered web page are also inherent to the Deep Fish application itself. When a web page is requested through Deep Fish, what’s actually happening is more of a proxy-type scenario. The request is first sent to Microsoft’s servers, who then make a proxy call to the destination website. Microsoft’s servers then receive the information from the destination site, turn it into a Deep Fish compatible image, then serve the image up to the Deep Fish app on the phone. In theory this is supposed to reduce the actual bandwidth that’s sent over the wireless data connection, but it also adds latency because there are multiple requests being made, and not just one.

Finally, a fully rendered version of MSNBC’s homepage appeared. Now 15 minutes into the exercise, it was a welcome sign that there was actually a functioning product, despite it’s Beta label.

Navigating a page

Page navigation is activated by depressing the joystick on the phone which activates a viewing box. This viewing box can then be moved to a portion of the web page that the end user wants to magnify. While it’s clear which part of the page is capable of being magnified, moving the viewing box around the screen is cumbersome, as the box only advances vertically and horizontally 1 pixel at a time.

Zooming in on a page section is accomplished by depressing the joystick button again. The zooming transition itself is fairly smooth, and is for the most part accurate.

Page Links

Once zoomed in on a page section, the navigation pad on the phone is used to toggle clickable links within that expanded page view. This process is not very intuitive, as Deep Fish did not provide a smooth transition between the links on the page. In many instances Deep Fish didn’t recognize some links and skipped over them as we were cycling through, creating a lot of frustration of not being able to click on a link that should’ve been easily recognized by the software.

First Impressions - Wait On This One

The premise behind Deep Fish is solid - bring a desktop like experience to mobile web browsing. If developers and site managers didn’t have to develop multiple sites for mobile and desktop browsing, that would save time and resources for a lot of companies. And, if the mobile experience were more robust, the theory would be that more powerful mobile phones would be appealing to a wider range of consumers because the experience would be *nearly* identical to that of the desktop.

Yet, Microsoft falls short of expectations, even for a beta release. Aside from the smooth transitional zooming into a smaller part of a webpage, there wasn’t a single experience with Deep Fish that went without some sort of trouble.

It’s surprising because, with all of the movement within the Live.com portal to bring software as a service to the masses, with their evolutionary “Ribbon” interface in the Office product line, and with Windows Mobile 6 on the horizon for many smartphone users, the strategic focus of the company appears to be more in tune with making the overall Microsoft engagement a more pleasing and productive one (for the sake of this discussion, we’ll leave Vista out).

But once again, the hype doesn’t quite measure up to the experience. Desktop browsing on a mobile phone will be the norm one day soon, but it looks like Microsoft won’t be the ones to successfully bring it to the masses. At least not with Deep Fish.

Deep Fish Website