We are excited to announce public availability of the Deepfish technology preview from Microsoft Live Labs.  Deepfish is a new type of mobile information browsing experience, aimed at preserving the rich layout and full form of documents on mobile devices while providing novel ways of effectively navigating that content on small screens.  Deepfish's unique interface enables you to zoom in and out of page, quickly getting to the areas you are interested in without screen length after screen length of scrolling.  And because the layout is preserved, navigation menus, lists of search results or news headlines, and other elements that might have been bent so thoroughly to fit the usual single column layout that they were no longer legible can now be browsed simply and easily.  A consequence of Deepfish's multi-resolution approach to browsing pages is that it loads a thumbnail of pages initially and then only what is needed for more detail when requested or in the background as you browse the initial the view, resulting in substantially quicker load times for most pages.

The preview is available for download now for Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices.  There are a limited number of slots available, and they will be distributed on a first come, first serve basis.  So, give it a try, and don't forget to let us know what you think about Deepfish.

Sound familiar?  Deepfish has surfaced briefly before through videos of an earlier build, but now is the first time you can try Deepfish for yourself.  As a technology preview, it is important to note that Deepfish is not a complete implementation of what you would expect of a shipping mobile browser--it does not support cookies or javascript for instance--however, it does provide for a great experience on most sites.  We have more information on how to use Deepfish and other details in our overview and FAQ.

Thank you,

The Live Labs Team

We would love to hear your comments and feedback about your experience with Deepfish. What works, what doesn't?  Would you like to see something new added or something implemented differently?  Just add a comment to this post and let us know what you think.