14 DAY TRIAL // This fall, a new set of mobile phones running under Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system should arrive on shelves, bringing to the market the latest flavor of the platform, codenamed Mango. It should come with a number of over 500 new features and enhancements, with the new Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Mobile being one of them.
IE9 brought to desktop PCs a more beautiful web, and IE9 for Windows Phone Mango should make a similar move on mobile phones.
Today, web developers can test their sites against IE9 Mobile through downloading and installing the Windows Phone Developer Tools on their PCs, as it already includes IE9 in the emulator.
But there's more to it, Joe Marini, principal program manager, Internet Explorer - Windows Phone, notes in a recent blog post, as a Mobile Test Drive is now in place for developers interested in learning more on IE9 Mobile what it can offer.
An Internet Explorer Test Drive site was put in place for IE9 to highlight various features and capabilities of Internet Explorer via Web development samples, and the new Mobile Test Drive builds on the same idea.
The Mobile Test Drive sports a number of 15 samples, but more of them should be added in the following months, as well as after the launch of Windows Phone Mango.
“It’s organized essentially the same way as the original, except laid out to be easily read and used on the mobile form factor,” Joe Marini explains.
“We’ve ported over some of the more popular samples from the full version of the IE Test Drive and have developed a few of our own mobile-specific ones too, including the demos that Joe Belfiore showed at MIX 11 earlier this year.
“It’s important to note that even though we use the same core rendering engines on both the desktop and mobile versions of IE and adhere to the concept of “same markup” when we produce our samples, we felt that it was worth creating a mobile test drive site to illustrate how we approach some of the key issues that developers face when creating mobile-optimized content: screen sizes, device capabilities, etc.”
The samples available on the Mobile Test Drive include Audio Player (from MIX11), Geolocation, Border Radius, DOM Local Storage, Scalable Vector Graphics, CSS3 Media Queries, DOMContentLoaded, FishIE Tank, Speed Reading (from MIX11), Animated Text, HamsterDance Revolution, Business Charts, IE Logo, Video Panorama, and Browser Control Theming.
The latest version of Windows Phone Developer Tools, namely 7.1 beta, can be downloaded from Softpedia as well, via this link.