It looks like a new release of Opera Mini is imminent. The 4.1 Beta has been out for a bit over a month and Opera just announced a contest where users are asked to submit a photo and testimonial to be used in a web collage promoting a new release of Opera Mini. The prize is “an Opera goodie-bag and instant Internet fame” The deadline for submissions is only a few days away, Monday, May 12th. Details here. Hum, I … Continue reading
Although my preferred mobile browser is still Opera Mini 4.0, I’ve been using Nokia’s WebKit on my N95 quite a bit lately. WebKit’s the browser that’s pre-installed on all S60 3rd edition phones including the N73, E61 and N95. It’s a very nice full-web browser based on the same open source core as Apple’s Safari. Like modern desktop browsers and also Opera Mobile and NetFront, the Nokia browser supports multiple windows or tabbed browsing. For some reason though, Nokia makes … Continue reading
I spent a few minutes playing around with the new LG Voyager (VX 1000) at the Verizon store on Market St in San Francisco. The Voyager is Verizon’s answer to the iPhone. I wasn’t too impressed with the phone as a whole, it’s just a tarted up BREW based feature phone, but the browser is something else entirely. It’s labeled as the Teleca Browser V 3.8 and is a full web browser in the style of Opera Mini and Mobile, … Continue reading
The mobile web is always evolving and one current trend is the rise of the full web on phone. By the full web, I mean being able to use any and all the web content available on PCs. It’s happening, thanks to better browsers and transcoders that can render almost any page on a phone screen. I’ve still believe that a made for mobile page will give a better user experience than a programmatic conversion of a page designed for … Continue reading
Bango.com is a service that handles payments for off-portal mobile content providers. If you are selling ring tones, games, videos or whatever on the mobile web Bango handles the complex details of collecting funds from users anywhere in the world either by direct billing on the customer’s phone bill, a credit card or PayPal. I’ve heard only good things about Bango’s billing service. I was intrigued when I learned about Bango’s new Bango Button service which is supposed to make … Continue reading
Opera Mini 4.0 is out of Beta! You can download it by pointing your phone or PC browser at operamini.com. There are no new features in this version compared with the last Beta. What there are is lots of bug fixes and compatibility with more handsets. Compared with Opera Mini, 3.1 though, 4.0 adds a huge list of enhancements; the main ones being OperaLink which synchronizes mobile bookmarks and Speed Dial with desktop Opera, and Desktop Rendering, Opera’s answer to … Continue reading
Thursday, Opera Software released new Beta versions of both their desktop browser (9.5) and Opera Mini (4.0 Beta 3) . The company celebrated the releases with a Rock’n Opera party here in San Francisco which I attended thanks to the great folks at Opera. The Beta releases were expected but Opera threw in a surprise new product. It’s called Opera Link and is a way to keep your web surfing activity synchronized across all the browsers you use, on multiple … Continue reading
I don’t mean “internets” in the sense of the George Bush’s “I hear there’s rumors on the, uh, Internets”. I’m thinking that while there is only one internet, there really are several separate unequal mobile webs. The inequality comes from the huge variation in capabilities of mobile phone browsers. I like to divide mobile browsers into 5 broad categories; full web, big page, advanced embedded, basic embedded and wml-only. At the top are the mobile “full web” browsers like the … Continue reading