We've (somewhat infamously) laid a bit of hateration on the Internet Explorer Mobile 6 on the Sprint Treo Pro.  Truth be told, if you can set aside or otherwise manage its heavy memory usage, it actually does quite well at rendering pages accurately.  We also have higher-than-you-might-expect hopes for IE6 on Windows Mobile 6.5 (more on that in a later post).

One of the hassles with IE6 on the Sprint Treo Pro is navigation, moving that little pointer around to find links and scroll pages can become quite a chore with the Treo Pro's D-Pad. There's a 'nuclear option' for dealing with that, namely rolling back some of IE6's interface 'improvements' with a registry hack that makes it behave like IE5 Mobile.  That's not really an ideal solution, however, even with the convenient (and clever!) cab file that automatically toggles between the two modes from CodyPPC.  

Lucky for us, Marc has emailed in this non-obvious tip: use the spacebar!  You can hit the spacebar solo to scroll down a full page.  Another option: hit Shift + Space either together or serially to hop down to the next link.  If you're wondering, both spacebar methods also work on the GSM version of the Treo Pro as well.

Sprint Treo Pro owners: How's IE6 Mobile treating you these days?

Thanks for the tip, Marc!

An anonymous tipster has sent in some screen shots and impressions of the upcoming Internet Explorer 6 browser that's coming to Windows Mobile in the very near future, the vaunted '6 on 6.' The bad news -- it's not at all clear that Microsoft will make this an independently-available download. We do know for sure that it will be baked-into the ROMs of many future smartphones. That leads us to the good news -- the screenshots we have here are from an upcoming WinMo device. Square Screen, 320x320 resolution, and the black theme are your clues as to what we're looking at (Yes, we have a guess).

The tipster sends these impressions along with the images: It's not going to bowl anybody over, not nearly impressive enough to replace either SkyFire or Opera Mobile 9.5. It's not all that much faster than the current generation of IE on Windows Mobile, though the added zooming functions are nice. Flash lite is here and works well (minus a few memory errors), though you're not going to enjoy videos much when you're zoomed-out.

You can set the browser to identify either as mobile (so you get served mobile pages by sites that auto-detect) or as desktop (so you get the full pages) and instead of a simple 'zoom out' feature as currently exists on WM6.1 there's a separate “Zoom / Panning Mode” for getting around.

After the break, we make with the screenshots and also toss in a couple of our own showing the current-gen IE from a Treo Pro for comparison.

6 on 6

Old School IE