Category Archives: Browsers

Ovi Browser, First Look – With Download Links

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Nokia’s Beta Labs introduced a Beta of the Ovi Browser Wednesday.  It’s based on the Vision browser from Novarra, which Nokia acquired five months ago. The Ovi browser is a proxy based browser, similar to Opera Mini. It renders and transcodes web pages on a server before sending them to the phone client in a highly compressed format. Nokia claims that the compression reduces web traffic by up to 90%. The Ovi browser supports the Nokia 2700 Classic, Nokia 2730 … Continue reading →

Mobile Bookmarklets, Now Easier Than Ever

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Bookmarkets are snippets of JavaScript in a browser bookmark that automate sharing links on Twitter or Delicious, subscribing to feeds in Google Reader or Bloglines, translating web pages to another language, fixing illegible page colors and much more. I use them all the time and find they really enhance my productivity. A couple of years ago I created o.yeswap.com, a special page of bookmarklets for Opera Mini users. Mini lacks drag and drop or any other way to directly save … Continue reading →

Opera Mobile 10.1 With Location Support For Symbian and Maemo

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Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Opera Mini 5.1 for Android release, Opera Software today put up Opera Mobile 10.1 for Symbian 3rd and 5th Edition and Maemo 4.1 and 5.0 (N800, N810 and N900). This release adds long anticipated support for Geolocation to along with: Support for CSS3 border-radius, background attachment, box-shadow, border-image attributes and for the 2D Transforms module. The latest Carakan JavaScript engine (with JIT on Maemo) The Vega vector graphics library An update of the Opera … Continue reading →

Opera Mini 5.1 for Android’s Saved State Soups Up Multitasking On The G1 and Magic

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Opera Mini for Android dropped the Beta tag with the release of Opera Mini 5.1 today. The new version brings a number of bug fixes and enhancements to Opera Mini on Google’s smartphone platform. The most significant improvement is that when Opera Mini  gets closed in the background by the Android OS it now saves its complete state, including the contents of all open tabs and the browsing history.  Android is very aggressive about closing apps that are in the … Continue reading →

Opera Mini 5.1 – Better Performance on Low End Devices And A Hint Of Future Location Support!

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Today,  Opera Software released a new 5.1 version of Opera Mini.  The main feature of  this release is that it’s been optimized to work well on low end phones with screens less than 200 px wide or under 4 MB of Java Heap memory. The optimization was accomplished mainly with a new lighter weight user interface that uses text rather than icons for the “Speed Dial” start page and dispenses with some of the icons in menus.  The light UI … Continue reading →

Samsung Bada’s Dolfin Browser

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Here’s a look at the capabilities of the Dolfin browser on the Samsung Wave Bada handset that I got at the Bada Developer Day in San Francisco on Tuesday. Dolfin is a WebKit based browser.  Webkit is used as the basis of the majority of smartphone browsers including those from Nokia, Palm, Android, Apple and soon RIM.  Although all these browsers are based on the open source Webkit core, as PPK points out, “There is no Webkit on Mobile”, instead … Continue reading →

Bookmarklets on Android?

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Regular readers know I’m a big fan of bookmarklets.  I use dozens of them in my desktop and mobile browsers to do things like post links to Delicious and Twitter, subscribe to feeds in Bloglines, expand text-areas and fix unreadable color combinations on websites. I’ve written about using bookmarklets in mobile browsers here on WapReview and I maintain a small archive of Opera Mini compatible bookmarklets at o.yeswap.com. So naturally when Google generously gave me an HTC Evo Android phone at … Continue reading →

In Spite Of A Few Quirks, The Evo’s Browser Is A Winner

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I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the HTC Evo Android phone that I got at Google I/O a couple of week’s ago. Google and Sprint gave Evos to all 5000 I/O attendees, press included. Sweet and thank you very much. I’m going to devote most of this post to the browser but first a few words about the phone itself, particularly two areas that have gotten some criticism in the press; the phone’s size and battery life. The Evo is a large … Continue reading →