Positioned as an alternative to traditional Web browsers for mobile phones, Zumobi offers a grid of 16 thumbnails that users can navigate by zooming into a quadrant, then zooming in again to a "tile." Tiles, potentially customizable by the user, include content from Zumobi partners such as AccuWeather.com, Amazon.com, The Associated Press, Flickr, MTV, and others. Content is not only cached on a device, but also continuously updated over the air, so users must have an unlimited data plan.
In the new version, updating takes place within five minutes of the time the program is first run, according to Zumobi. Other performance improvements are said to include quicker rendering when zooming in and out of tiles, and faster placement of new tiles in a user's "zoom space."
A collection of Zumobi "tiles"Zumobi adds that the application's .CAB installer file is now smaller, and now comes in a single version that supports all types of Windows Mobile device. Additionally, the program can now reside on a phone's expansion card instead of taking up internal memory.
Further informationOriginally developed by Microsoft Research, Zumobi runs on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 smartphones, according to the company.
Zumobi was known as "ZenZui" when the product and the company of the same name were
spun off from Microsoft in March 2007. Zumobi the product was subsequently
released as a public beta last December. And, most recently, Microsoft
agreed to distribute Zumobi with Windows Mobile, though details of how that will be achieved have not yet been released.
Pledging to offer "an open, device-neutral platform for building and deploying rich content for mobile phones," Zumobi has also released a beta version of its SDK. This will allow developers to create their own tiles, which they can upload to the "Zumobi Gallery." For more details on Zumobi, see our earlier coverage,
here.
AvailabilityZumobi version 1.0 is available now from the company's website,
here.
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