Late last week the Fennec team announced its first significant milestone for the Windows Mobile platform, with the release of Alpha 1. Brad Lassey introduced the milestone and highlighted exciting features of the release in a blog post, which was then quoted in quite a few pieces of press coverage.

To date there have been more than 20 original pieces of coverage, with the majority of tone being positive toward the release. There has also been widespread understanding in the community that this is an early developer release, really intended for testing purposes.

CNET’s Jessica Dolcourt comments on the technical features of the release, “For the techies, Mozilla built its interface for Fennec Alpha 1 for Windows Mobile using CSS. This will help the app adjust to various screen sizes and resolutions, says Mozilla. The Mountain View, Calif., company also divulged that this Fennec build shares Firefox’s memory management library, JeMalloc. This resource-sharing is another indication that Mozilla is striving to create a mobile product as identical to its desktop offering on its back end as is technologically possible.”

Sean Michael Kerner from Internet News sums it up nicely, “Yes, there is a long way for Fennec to go before its final. But it is moving in the right direction with new platforms coming on early in the process. As mobile device vendors continue to open up their own platforms for application stores, I can see a huge opportunity for Fennec.”

Coverage highlights:

IT Pro, Heise Online, Phones Review, Silicon.com, Mobile Choice UK , Personal Computer World , PC Pro, ZDNet, Pocket-Lint, LifeHacker, Mobile News Direct, Trusted Reviews, Linux Insider, Geek.com, InformationWeek, ZDNet, The H, Mobile Marketing News, Phones Review, TechWhack, engadget, IntoMobile, Unwired View

On Tuesday, our mobile team released Fennec 1.0 Beta 1!

Scott Gilbertson at Wired writes, “The latest Fennec beta brings in two new features from its desktop cousin — The “awesome bar” search engine, which makes it easier to get to frequently visited sites with less typing; and also new is  TraceMonkey, the same, much-improved JavaScript engine set to arrive in Firefox 3.5. Other improvements in the latest release include faster panning, better zoom tools, and other performance related tweaks.”

You can read more about this important mobile milestone in TechCrunch, Lifehacker, CNET, Ars Technica, Network World, Gizmodo, and PC World.