Tag Archives: mobile browsers

In Praise Of Mobile Browser Navigation Controls

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Nokia E6- WordPress Menu

  My recent trial of a Nokia E6 reinforced something I’ve suspected for a long time. The current fad of removing navigation controls like arrow keys, D-pad, trackball or touchpad from touch screen phones is bad for usability. Designers seem have fallen in love with the idea of a smooth, all-screen front face on their devices, which means removing as many buttons as possible. But, you may say, navigation controls are redundant on a touch device as you can just tap links … Continue reading →

Why You Should Take Mobile Web Traffic Statistics With A Grain of Salt

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StatCounter Chart

We’ve all seen charts like the one above from StatCounter, often accompanied by headlines saying things like “the iPhone is responsible for 64% of all mobile traffic”,  “4.5% of all web traffic comes from mobile browsers”, or “smartphones are responsible for over half of all mobile page views”. These reports make interesting reading but I’m not sure how accurate most of them are. The data usually comes from analytics services like Quantcast, StatCounter or Net Applications. These services do a … Continue reading →

My Mobile Web Predictions For Last Year – The Scorecard

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New Years Fireworks Rio by over_kind_man - Some rights reserved

Photo by over_kind_man – Some rights reserved Now that the year is over it’s time to look back at the predictions I made a year ago and compare them with what actually happened with mobile browsers,  web apps and  platforms in 2010. Prediction: There will be major improvements in smartphone mobile browser technology. Mozilla, Opera, Nokia, Skyfire, Google and RIM will compete to deliver a near desktop experience on high end devices. Expect to see better and faster JavaScript engines … Continue reading →

Opera Mini 5 Beta – First Impressions

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Early this morning Opera Software released the long awaited  first Beta of Opera Mini 5.  You can get it by pointing your phone’s built in browser at mini.opera.com/next.  Or download the .jad and .jar fles or the Blackberry .alx and .cod to your PC for side loading from opera.com/mini/next/download/ Opera Mini 5 is bigger at 221 KB than its 125 KB predecessor and uses more phone resources.  Given the new features this is to be expected but it also means … Continue reading →

Get More From Your BlackBerry with Opera Mini

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If you have a BlackBerry and aren’t using Opera Mini 4.2 you are missing out on what is in my opinion, the best BlackBerry application.  Mini is a small (under 170KB) application that implements a full html web browser that rivals and in many cases exceeds the performance of the best smartphone browsers. And yes that includes Safari on the iPhone. Compared with the built-in BlackBerry browser, especially on older models like my 7100i, Mini is so overwhelmingly superior that … Continue reading →

Delivr Update Simplifies Mobile Sharing

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I’ve been using Delivr.com since launched in December.  It’s so powerful and does so many things that it’s hard to summarize.  I covered it in depth here. One use of Delivr is as a mobile aware short URL service with one-click posting to many social networking and bookmarking sites. Supported services include  Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google Bookmarks, Jaiku, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Plaxo and Delivr’s own micro-blogging service. That’s not all though, using the same one click iterface, you can send … Continue reading →

Copy Webpage Text With Opera Mini, S60 and Blackberry

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The ability to copy text from a web page is one of the most requested features by users on the Opera Mini Forum. It’s such a basic and useful function that’s available in all desktop browsers, yet hardly any mobile browsers support it.  A clever coder who goes by the handle “Cousinisaac” has found a way make web text copying possible not only in Opera mini but with several other mobile browsers too. Cousinisaac created a simple web form at … Continue reading →

Opera Mini Tip – Easy Bookmark Management

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This is the second in a continuing series of tips on getting the most out of Opera Mini, the great Java based mobile browser that brings full web browsing to almost any phone. Opera Mini supports bookmarks of course. It’s very easy to bookmark the current page using the menus or with the shortcut key combination of  the # key followed by the 7 key . Opera Mini also has a great feature called “Speed Dial” which lets you assign  … Continue reading →