Firefox OS Launching Early 2013 – A First Look and Screenshots

At yesterday’s Mobile 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Mozilla and Telefónica did a presentation of the soon to be released Firefox OS. Formerly known as Boot 2 Gecko (B2G), Firefox OS is a smartphone operating system optimized for relatively low end hardware and targeted at customers in developing economies. The Firefox OS architecture is relatively simple. It consists of the Mozilla Gecko layout engine and JIT JavaScript compiler running directly on a hardware abstraction layer sitting on top of a generic … Continue reading

Opera Mini 7 for Symbian Update 2 Released

The Opera Mini Browser for Symbian has been updated. The new release is designated as Opera Mini 7.0 Update 2 for Symbian. The version number is 7.0.31380. Update 2 is a performance and bug fix release, there are no new features. A post by Opera’s Torstein Aasebø on the My Opera Forum lists the changes in this release as: Improved progress bar behavior when loading big pages Improved font support and text drawing Various fixes and improvements on network level … Continue reading

Switch Browser App – Adds an “Open With” Menu to All Android Browsers

When you are developing mobile web apps it’s important to test in as many browsers as possible. There are lots of Android browsers and I have most of them installed on my phone for testing purposes. I just discovered a great little Android app that makes cross browser testing a little easier. It’s  Switch Browser by Vimperator and it adds an option of the same name to the Share menu of every Android browser that’s installed on your phone or tablet. To use … Continue reading

How San Francisco’s AT&T Park Became the Best Connected Venue in the World

Yesterday, AT&T invited me and a dozen or so other bloggers and journalists to a San Francisco Giants game at AT&T Park here in San Francisco. It was a great experience starting with a limo ride to the stadium and ending up with us being seated in AT&T’s corporate box with abundant catered food and beer available. In spite of the Giants losing, I had a great time at the game. But what preceded was interesting too. Our group was … Continue reading

A Don’t Miss Event: Mobile 2.0, San Francisco Sept. 11, 2012

One of my favorite mobile events Mobile 2.0, will be held at the San Francisco Grand Hyatt Tuesday, Sept 11th, which is less than a month from now. Mobile 2.0 always has great speakers and panelists and this year is no different. Presenters include Andrew Nash, Director Internet Identity at Google, Sprint VP Russ McGuire, Oracle’s Michael Neuenschwander, Kevin Marks from Salesforce.com, Telefónica’s Daniel Appelquist, GetJar CEO Chris Dury, Michael Rubin, Executive Director, Business Development, AT&T Interactive, Alex Linde, VP, Mobile & … Continue reading

UC Browser 8.5 for Symbian Reviewed

UC Browser 8.5 for Symbian  was released a few weeks ago.  UC is a proxy based browser similar to Opera Mini. Proxy browsers pre-render and compress pages in the cloud before they are downloaded to the mobile client, which makes them particularly suited to basic phones, slow networks and anywhere that mobile data is expensive. Although relatively unknown in the US and Western Europe, the UC Browser claims 300 million users worldwide. The majority of UC users are in China, … Continue reading

Impressive Webs – Web Design Articles and Tutorials

New Site Added to the Wap Review Mobile Directory Mobile Link: www.impressivewebs.com Rating: Content  Usability Doctype: HTML5 Home Page Weight: 275 KB (490 KB uncompressed) Category: Web Design & Development Description: Web design articles and tutorials from Toronto based developer designer and author Louis Lazaris. The site is updated regularly. It uses an attractive responsive design that works well in modern mobile direct browsers and Opera Mini. Screenshots:

Follow the London Olympics With Any Mobile Browser

The 2012 London Olympics start tomorrow July, 27th and run through August 12th.  I expect the Games will dominate online news for the next two and a half weeks. There will be no shortage of ways to follow the Olympics on your mobile phone.  But finding the best Olympics coverage or the results of your favorite obscure sport won’t be so easy. From the Wap Review Mobile Directory’s Sports/Summer Olympics page, here are my top picks for in depth coverage of the 2012 … Continue reading