One of the great things about the Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers is their support for bookmarklets which JavaScript bookmarks that interact with the current page. Bookmarklets can send the page’s URL to a web service like Google Translate to retrieve a copy in your native language or post the URL to social bookmarking service such as Delicious.com.  Bookmarklets can also modify the page to do things like change plain text URLs into clickable links.

While bookmarklets are supported by all major desktop browsers, mobile browser support is not common. Besides the Opera browsers onlyPalm Blazer, the iPhone Safari and Mobile Internet Explorer offer bookmarlets.

UCWEB guru JBpseudo has found a way to add much of the power of bookmarlets to already full-featured  UCWEB mobile browser using what he calls”Searchlets”.   To use Searchlets you need to install a patch which is currently available for the Symbian S60 V1, V2 and V3 releases of UCWEB 6.3.

Get the patch from this post on the UCWEB forum.  There are two versions of the patch, one for S60V3 the other for V1 and V2.  The patch is delivered in the form of a zip file containing a readme and a .sis or .sisx file, which is the patch itself.  Extract the patch and install it using PC Suite or by sending it to the phone with Bluetooth, etc.

Searchlets work by adding additional options (top image) to UCWEB’s search dialog, which normally only offers Google mobile search.  The patch comes with 17 searchlets.  Some just add additional search engines including Wikipedia, IMDb, MS Live and Yahoo.  Others duplicate the functionality of some of the most popular bookmarklets.

The additional search engines don’t require any special steps to use, just click on the search box on the UCWEB start page and type a query.  You can also make use of UCWEB’s ability to copy text from the current page and paste it into the search box.

Some of the searchlets require you to paste the current page’s URL into the search box.  Here’s how:

1. Copy the current page URL by pressing shortcut  for add bookmark (default is # + 6).  On the Add Bookmark screen scroll down to the address field and copy the URL into the S60 system copy buffer. How you do this varies depending on the phone model.  On most phones, including the N95, you press the pencil key and choose copy.  On QWERTY phones like the E71, just press Ctrl-C to copy. On phones without a pencil key, press * and choose copy.
2. Hit Cancel to exit the Add Bookmark screen.
3. Press 0 to go to the start page and click the search box. JBpseudo  recommends assigning  a shortcut key to the Search dialog for faster access. To modify the shortcuts go to Menu > Settings > General Settings > Shortcuts Tab > scroll down to “Search” and enter your desired shortcut key which can be 1-9 , * or # followed by 1-9 .  JBpseudo recomends using 8.
4. Paste the URL into the searchbox using Ctrl-V on QWERTY phones or by pressing the pencil or * key and choosing paste other models. Select a searchlet  from the list and hit “OK”.

The patch comes with the following Searchlets:

1. Google: Full HTML version of Google Web search.
2. Yahoo:  OneSearch mobile search.
3. MSN: Full web version of MS Live Search.
4. GTranslate: Translate the current page or the target of any URL to English from Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, etc..
5. Delicious: Add page or URL to Delicious.com using the standard Delicious add bookmark form.
6. Phone favs: Add  URL to bookmarking site PhoneFavs.com
7. Google Info: Links to everything Google knows about a URL; description, incoming links, related pages, etc.
8. Google Cache: View Google’s cached version of a page.
9. Wikipedia: Search Wikipedia.
10. IMDB: View information about a movie at IMDb.com
11. Dictionary: Look up a word at dictionary.com
12. FLV/MP4: Download videos from YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, iFilm, etc  in FLV or Mp4 format using keepvid.com.
13. Similicio.us: View similar web pages at similicio.us.
14. TinyURL: Generate a short URL  at tinyurl.com.
15. GBookmarks: Add current page to Google Bookmarks.
16. Whois Lookup: Get complete info about a domain at Whois.com.
17. Wayback Machine: View old versions of the current page at archive.org.

Searchlets are a great addition to UCWEB.  Thanks to JBpseudo for this great hack.  He’s currently working on finding  a way to automatically copy the current page URL into the search box to make the  process even easier and quicker.

Related Posts
Mobile Browser Test – UCWEB6
New SkyFire and UCWEB Betas
UCWEB 6.3 Official Signed English Version Released for S60
Official Release of UCWEB 6.3 For Java ME
Bookmarklets for Opera Mini
Updated Opera Mini Bookmarklets Page