Aug

18

I’ve posted earlier about my adventures with a MS Smartphone 2002. Apparently late last week the 2003 SDK was released and there are quite a few enhancements that I’ve been hoping will make it into the next release. The first is an upgrade to the version of IE that runs on Smartphone. It’s been reported that IE was completely rebuilt for Smartphone 2003. This is great news. The version that came with 2002 needed some improvements in order for people to really use their phone to view online content. Opera has a browser for phones that does a really good job and of course everyone talked about how it was superior to IE on phones. This was true when it came to things like XHTML Mobile Edition, and CSS, and other standards developers are settling into these days. However, now IE supports all of these things and adds some additions. The additions like render layout could cause some problems for developers, but they may not. I won’t know until I test some things on it. Lately I’ve been comparing the support of “features” between IE on Smartphone and the Nokia based browsers for the Series 60 phones. It’s been my disappointment that IE 2002 didn’t support some key WAP/WML/XHTML abilities, whereas Nokia helped write the standards and have supported and documented them very very well. This new release of IE seems to fix any disappointment I may have encountered with 2002. From what I am reading in the SDK and on sites, it appears that the challenges that I had discovered might just be “fixed”.

I have not been able to read the SDK completely, but I will post something once I find out more about the .NET compact framework support and also the Active X/plug-in situation. I am hoping we will see a Flash plug-in for the Smartphone platform. Apps like Animated Today and others could really make the platform much more useable and create some great development opportunities for Flash developers. I’m still going with my instinct that Flash can become an application development tool and mobile devices makes it a great fit for just that.

Aug

12

I’ve been experimenting with my smartphone lately, more specifically the version of IE that comes with Smartphone 2002. I am still testing things out but so far I have discovered that Smartphone IE does not support XHTML file types, nor does it support CSS. I was amazed to see that the accesskey attribute for the anchor tag has been added and actually works.

So what this means is that it is almost worth waiting for the new version of the OS to come out (later this year, early 2004?). Microsoft, if you are listening, I would like to beta test, and build some Web something or other for the launch. Right now the option is that you can build for these phones and build in accesskey functionality. However, it is a pain to not use CSS, and building things in inflexible HTML seems like the wrong approach. If the effort is going into the project, I would like to at least use XHTML so I can use it again later, when more is supported.

WML works as expected on the device, however, I was not able to get the accesskey attribute of the anchor tag working. So maybe Mobile IE only supports WAP 1.1 at this point. If you are interested in developing WAP and Mobile compliant XHTML, I recommend downloading the Nokia Mobile Internet Toolkit. It includes some very nice documentation on WAP and XHTML standards for their devices (well some of them, I have heard that the browsers are not the same depending on model of phone).

As a seperate note, the SDK does include some really good C++ samples and there are some out on MSDN as well. There is a great article written about consuming the MapPoint.NET SOAP service in C++. I am working on it right now. If I am reading it right, this SOAP service could be consumed by Flash in its next iteration. I am waiting to start seeing examples of C# samples pretty soon for the .NET Compact Framework.

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