Mobileography

Samsung has released another firmware update for the popular Instinct, and it seems to be a good one.  According to Gizmodo, the update includes some major enhancements to the browser.  The browser seems to to be the achilles heel of most phones (just ask my wife about her BlackJack), so it’s nice to see them working hard to make this one better.

They claim a 10x improvment in rendering speed, which must be a stunning improvement for people that are used to the old one.

In addition, you can now hide the browser controls (to give you more screen real estate), the favorites UI has been improved, and there have been 34 other browser-related tickets closed.  Not bad!

admin Browsers, Samsung, Software browser, firmware, instinct, Samsung, update

This is pretty slick.  Starting with firmware 2.1, specially coded mobile websites can be designed to run just like your other apps!  If you are on a site that supports this, you simply save the app to your home screen, just like you’ve always done.  When you tap the icon, the page will load in a clean window (no Safari wrapper), and it loads very quickly (no wrapper, less overhead).

For you webmasters out there, changing your site to support this is very easy.  Simple add these three lines of code to your page header area:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;” />
<meta name=”apple-mobile-web-app-capable” content=”yes” />
<meta names=”apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style” content=”black-translucent” />

That’s it! I’ve already found a few sites that support it, such as Google Earth Hacks Mobile and Food Info DB, as well as a very slick demo from Clancy, and I’m sure many more will soon. If your site does it, please list it on the comments.

I’d love to see Google implement this for some of their mobile sites. It would make Google Calendar and Reader very useful. C’mon Google, do it!

admin Apple, Browsers Apple, icon, iphone, web apps

A new browser is now available for your S60 phone (N95, etc), and it’s promising the world — Skyfire.� It sounds similar to Mobile Safari (pan, zoom, etc), but supports Flash and Ajax.� All in all, it looks to be a pretty powerful piece of software.

TechCrunch has 200 invites to give away, and IntoMobile has 50 more.� Give it a shot and let us know what you think of it.

Also, here is a brief video showing how it works on a Windows Mobile device:

admin Browsers, Nokia browser, s60, skyfire

About about a month in beta, Opera Mini 4.1 has been released.� The featureset is unchanged, consisting of:

• 50% speed increase from Opera Mini 4.0
• URL suggestion / autocomplete
• Save pages for offline viewing
• Upload/download files (ringtones, images, etc) from within the browser.

There’s no reason not to upgrade, so go get it at OperaMini.com.

admin Browsers opera mini

Android keeps looking better and better.� Opera has just announced that they have created a version of Opera Mini specifically designed for Android.� Opera Mini is my favorite browser on the N95 (though TeaShark is a close second), and I’m glad they decided to built it for Android.

Now, just get me an Android-powered phone in the QWERTY-slide-out form factor (like the Samsung Glyde) and I’ll be a happy man.

admin Browsers android, opera

The beta version of Opera Mini 4.1 has been released, with a handful of new features:

• 50% faster than 4.0
• Autocomplete URLs
• Save full pages
• Download and upload files from within the browser

You can get it at operamini.com/beta

(via AllAboutSymbian)

admin Browsers, Software opera, opera mini

TeaShark has just released their mobile browser into beta, and it’s quite impressive. It features a nifty way to handle multiple tabs, the rendering is solid, and load times are quite good. In a lot of ways it feels similar to Opera Mini.

It does a neat thing with its menu. Most of the time, it is compressed to a couple of pixels at the bottom of the screen (see the screenshot on the right). They realize that screen real estate is gold and this feature makes browsing much better.

So far I have just two small complaints:

• I can’t log in to AdSense with it. The login boxes simply aren’t there. The same is true with the S60 browser, though Opera Mini handles it just fine.
• It wants everything to be a fully-rendered page. I’m still on a cell phone, and I often want mobile versions of sites. They certainly work in TeaShark, but they’re harder to find. I don’t think TeaShark identifies itself to servers as being a mobile browser, so web servers don’t know to push mobile content to it.

All in all, this is an amazing piece of software, especially considering it is only in beta. This could very easily become the primary browser on my phone, and I’m already looking forward to the next version coming out!

Update: It might help if I gave links on how to download it. To get it on your PC (and transfer to your phone), you can go here. To download directly onto your phone, visit wap.teashark.com.

admin Browsers, Software adsense, opera mini, teashark

Opera has just finished updating the server that powers Opera Mini 4, with some nice enhancements.

From their forums:

• Added a simple UI to the server-side preferences that exists. Go to ‘opera:config’ to configure some settings.
• Tweaked phone number detection, there should be somewhat fewer false positives now, but you can now also disable the feature on the opera:config page.
• Increased the default timeouts to 40 seconds from 20.
• Updated to a HTML rendering engine to be similar to the latest Opera 9.5 weekly release.
• Fixed support for entering hostnames starting with a number (eg, 360.yahoo.com) as a URL without the starting http://
• Made content folds visible even when the background is black.
• Fixed inter-page links ().
• Fixed clipping rectangle for iframes with hidden overflow css properties, this bug caused some links inside some iframes to be unclickable.
• Fixed HTTP basic auth for pages with non-7bit authentication realm.
• Pages with nested <a> tags are now somewhat easier to navigate (<a href=’link’>Link 1 <a href=’link2′> Link 2</a></a>), it’s now possible to follow both the inner and the outer link.
• New WML stylesheet.
• Various optimizations resulting in the average transcoding time to be 20% lower.

All in all, it looks to be a very nice upgrade. The great part is that no update is required on your end — it’s all on their server. Talk about an easy upgrade…

admin Browsers opera, opera mini

The Weather Channel has just introduced a long-overdue update to their mobile site, finally making it something worth using.

Some of the features include:

• Hourly Forecasts
• Current Conditions
• Hurricane Central
• Radar and Satellite Maps
• Severe Weather Updates
• Airport Delays
• Pollen Conditions
• Traffic
• Baseball Stadium Forecasts

More information about this update can be found here, or you can pull up the new site on your phone at weather.mobi.

Here is their full press release:

The Weather Channel Interactive (TWCI) today announced a revamped mobile Web site featuring new maps, ski information and a redesign that moves current conditions into the page header. The Weather Channel Mobile Web is one of the top five Mobile Internet Sites and averages more than six million unique users per month, making it the most popular weather resource on the mobile Web according to Nielsen Mobile.

The new TWCI Mobile Web navigation, which highlights current conditions on the page header, was based on customer feedback and usage. Other content such as Pollen Forecast and Boat and Beach information have been moved to more prominent locations in the navigation so that users have direct access to these popular features. In addition, new maps have been added which offer more surface level detail on radar and satellite maps.

Just in time for the heart of ski season, The Weather Channel Mobile has added ski content and conditions including current weather conditions for popular resorts, surface conditions, base depth, new snow, and open lifts. Users can search for conditions at a ski resort based on their current location, state, or country. In addition, weather almanac data including average temperatures, record highs and lows, sunrise and sunset and monthly temperature and precipitation averages is now available.

“As one of the most popular mobile Web destinations, we try to monitor customer feedback and traffic patterns to ensure that the site reflects our customers’ needs,” said Louis Gump, vice president, Mobile for TWCI. “Our new ski section is a perfect example of providing our active, on-the-go users the information they are looking for, in this case even when they are on the ski lift, planning their next run.”

The Weather Channel Mobile is consistently one of the top five mobile Web sites in the US, and offers advertisers a great opportunity to reach active engaged users with unique ad products that include geo-targeted and weather triggered ads. For more information visit http://www.weather.com/mobile.

admin Browsers, Weather Weather