This release is pre-alpha, and intended to get the product into the hands of early adopters in order to get feed back and bug reports. In order to focus our efforts on getting this release out, we have targeted only one device, the HTC Touch Pro. This has a number of user interface implications, including graphics designed for a 300 dpi screen, control layout intended for a vga screen and reliance on a hardware keyboard for text input.

You can install this on your HTC Touch Pro by navigating to the cab installer with your existing browser. This will download the cab file and kick off the installation process.

Alternatively you can download the cab file to your desktop and transfer it to your device via activesync. Once the cab file has been copied to you device, navigate to it using file explorer (on the device) and click on the cab file to launch the installer.

Please note, its been brought to our attention that some carriers are filtering web traffic to preclude downloading cab files. If this is the case with your carrier, you’ll either have to download to your desktop and transfer by activesync, or be connected by wifi if you download directly to the device.

Our focus to this point has been to have a working, usable browser. To get there in a hurry we have punted in a few places, and I’d like to point a couple of them out. First is the update mechanism (both for the browser itself and for extensions). After installing this release, you will not be offered updates automatically, so please stay tuned for follow up releases. Also, we have disabled plug-in support. This is one of our high priority items going forward. Finally, as I mentioned before, there is no soft keyboard support. On an HTC Touch Pro, you’ll have to slide out the keyboard to enter a url.

Besides the release, we marked another major milestone yesterday when the final patch to NSPR landed and we were able to build for Windows Mobile off Mozilla’s trunk for the first time ever. I say the first time because minimo was built from branches of both NSS and NSPR.