There’s no such thing as a perfect smartphone operating system. They all have their pros and cons, and it’s really hard to recommend a device to someone without knowing what they actually want to do with said device. Android lets users tweak the living bejesus out of their operating system, doing things like installing new keyboards, browsers, even custom ROMs. Focusing specifically on browsers for a second, on Android the situation is like that on the PC. There’s Firefox, Opera, the built-in WebKit based browser, plus a whole bunch of other ones we’re probably not even aware of. On iOS it’s quite a different story. Customization is severely limited, some may say it’s even nonexistent. Looking at browsers, there are genuinely no options. Apps like Atomic Browser or Dolphin are simply skins of the default browser. Think of the different iOS web browsers like Flock, which was basically Firefox, but with a new UI tailored to appease social media whores.
Enter SurfCube 3D for Windows Phone. Now we’re not exactly sure whether or not Windows Phone supports alternative browsers in the Android style way of allowing new browsing engines or in the iOS style of allowing custom skins, but we really like what we’re seeing here. Mark Guim from The Nokia Blog demos the easy to use interface that’s essentially a three dimensional cube, and best of all it actually renders websites that the stock Windows Phone web browser (Internet Explorer) simply chokes on. We’re trying to get in touch with the developers to figure out how they’re doing that, but our gut feeling is that they’re spoofing their user agent. In other words, they’re telling Facebook’s servers that it isn’t a Windows Phone requesting a webpage to render, but instead an Android or iOS device.
Sometimes a little deception, for the sake of compatibility, goes a long way.