Archive for: mobile safari
Back in November, Verizon spent a truckload of money on marketing their new hot baby, the Motorola DROID. Several months later, we can see that the marketing paid off relatively well with Motorola enjoying some of the best income they’ve seen since the RAZR days with Verizon seeing an equally nice share of added income. Around that same time, a somewhat humorous though useless app called “DROID does” was submitted to Apple for sale in the App Store. The app did nothing, instead acting more as a “behind enemy lines” advertising billboard for the DROID and Verizon. No surprise here — Apple rejected it.
Forget the third time, the second attempt is the real charm. The “DROID” moniker has finally made it’s way to the iPhone ecosystem thanks to a new browser app called “iDroid Mini Browser”. While this browser replacement is rather light on features, it still manages to knock the socks off of the previous DROID themed app. Seeing as how the first Droid iPhone app was nothing more than a joke, this isn’t all too surprising.
Upon firing up iDroid, users will be greeted with a “Quick Links” screen with available slots for up to (9) favorite sites. Adding sites is a tad inconvenient however, requiring users to navigate away from the quick links screen to enter their web URL’s, http://xxxx and all.
One other thing that bugs me: People are calling it “the first tabbed iPhone browser”. Umm, the iPhone has had tabbed browsing since 2007. Because of the way the iPhone OS and Mobile Safari are designed, even thought the sudo tabs are separate windows without actual browser tabs being displayed onscreen at all times, the little window/tab button on the bottom right of Mobile Safari allows quick and easy window/tab browsing across multiple sites at the same time — the same exact thing a desktop-like “tabbed browser” does as well. Is it the first multi-tasking/tabbed browser? No.
Personal nitpicks aside, no matter the lengths Apple has gone through so far to keep “DROID” references from entering the iPhone ecosystem, it looks like they’ve finally been infiltrated.
Dvice
- December 9, 2009 12:48 pm
Being on the mobile web just a few short years ago meant navigating extremely rudimentary WAP web pages and dealing with painfully slow load times. That is if you could even get a site to properly/completely load on your device. Thankfully technology doesn’t sit still and in fact runs a breakneck speed. In today’s world, we have browsers such as Mobile Safari, Mobile Chrome, SkyFire, and Opera mini to name a few. While all of the mobile browsers listed (and several unlisted) are all good in most forms, SkyFire is the contender taking the cake today. You see, that little browser that could was upgraded with a new set of numbers and freshened up feature set today. The enhancements aren’t minor ones either but are actually fairly worthwhile.
The newest SkyFire brings many features to the table such as:
- Sleeker, more finger friendly UI
- Crisper text & smoother scrolling
- Full support for higher resolution screens. Now natively supporting VGA and wVGA displays
What do you think? Worth your time? Let me remind all of you that besides the newly released features, SkyFire is the only (free) mobile browser that supports both Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. Now, personal mileage will vary as some lesser powered phones may have a few performance issues when encountering flash/silverlight content. But I surely can’t argue with the fact that something is better than nothing.
If I were you and had a device that was able to take advantage of SkyFire, I wouldn’t hesitate even for a second. Pick up your copy of SkyFire here and get ready to question yourself as to how you ever scoured the digital web without it…
TechCrunch
When consumers have to take fair use matters into their own hands, things can often get complicated and messy. Much hoop jumping and settings changes are often required leaving the goal being sought one for only the more tech literate. In regards to tethering iPhone OS 3.0, especially in places where there isn’t any support at all, let alone a paid solution, users now have a quick and free option. Instead of the older methods that have beena round for awhile that involve some file management and manipulation, this latest method involves browsing to “help.benm.at” on your iPhone browser, downloading a file (which edits your carrier file(s)), and then simply turning on tethering in the settings menu. Obviously, theres a boat load full of problems that could go wrong ranging from lost data to being disconnected from your carrier if they found out. Of course, a carrier that disconnects your from using a different method of downloading data on an “unlimited” network doesn’t deserve your money in the first place. Another thing to think about — there are some reports saying this file editing disables MMS and VisualVoicemail. A small price to pay for mobile tethering freedom. You down?
Source: Engadget, Richard Lai
Now before you sell your background capable smartphone, put on a cape, and try to jump off the roof, you may want to first know that it isn’t true background processing still. It isn’t like you can open an app such as Pandora, get the digital bits flowing and then back out of it expecting to still hear your streaming audio goodness in the background. That still won’t fly. However, thanks to mobile Safari’s latest updates and support for HTTP streaming audio and video. So what exactly does that mean? Well, the HTTP streaming audio and video support isn’t a new revelation. The background support of those HTTP streams is however. All you have to do is point mobile safari to a streaming site such as tune.mobi, hit the home button, and get ready to enjoy background streaming audio. While this background support comes exclusively for Apple’s in house mobile Safari app and the features within, don’t get to worked up over any false hopes of it spreading to 3rd party apps within the near future. Still, those craving Apple approved background support should be happy with what they can get. Is HTTP audio/video streaming where it’s at? Shout out.
Source: Into Mobile, MattRaskin
While the iPhone’s Mobile Safari web browser and Opera mobile have been jockeying the numero uno position since ’09 started, the latest results are in showing that Opera has once again surpassed the iPhone in mobile web browsing market share. The reason? Who knows the real reason, other than Opera saw a sharp increase in web usage, accounting for a 24.6% share of the mobile web market. The iPhone on the other hand fell to 17.9%. Such statistics may be boring to look at but show that while the iPhone is often regarded as “the” phone to browse the web on, many other devices and users are beginning to join the mobile web. Of course, it’s worth noting that the iPhone and Mobile Safari are currently available on only 2 phones. Opera on the other hand is available for dozens of units giving it as some would say, an unfair advantage. Take it how you want it, I’m merely the messenger.
Source:http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/06/02/opera.beats.safari.mobile/
**Source: Electronista
Microsoft as of late has been really pushing the whole “value” mentality when comparing Windows boxes to Apple powered ones. More or less, the gist of Microsoft’s latest “Laptop Hunter” ads were that Microsoft is more affordable and gives you more for less. They portray Apple computers as overpriced with the consumer paying a premium for a simple fruit logo on the machine. Microsoft while still very much having a majority of the computer market by user base percentage isn’t lying down and is pushing their offensive right into Apple’s home turf. As you can see above, the animated Laptop Hunter ads on that particular mobile site give Apple and iPhone users a chance to “see what kind of PC they are”. While Apple can’t really do anything about the ads as the site isn’t owned by Apple and last time I checked site owners can display whatever they want, I’m sure Apple is a bit uneasy having people classify their PC persona on their device. Granted, these ads can appear on any mobile platform software and hardware and aren’t exactly a direct assault on Apple by team Redmond. Still, it’s a bit amusing to see this particular combination…don’t you think?
Source: Alley Insider
If you are the type that loves multitasking and loves your iPhone but hate how you can only see one site at a time in mobile Safari, iBrowseTwo, developed by 7sql, is here to fill you life with a little more enlightenment. Said application allows iPod Touch and iPhone users to have to web pages displayed at the same time, side-by-side on the screen effectively doubling your enjoyment…right?! Controls as far as navigation around individual web pages as well as handling linking and such are all down by the usual swipes, pinches, grabs, and “click”. One other nifty if somewhat gimmicky feature is the implementation of a red/green url bar that lets your know when you are disconnected/connected respectively. Of course if you can’t see the status bar than said feature becomes quite a bit more useful. Full feature list inside.
I would consider myself borderline fanboy so my eyes and ears were perked when I saw this. According to a video posted on JKon the Ron, the Palm Pre is shown on video loading Big12Sports.com in 7 seconds. What’s the big deal you ask. Only that an iPhone running over WiFi took over 30 seconds to load the same javascript and graphics heavy site! Uh-oh. I hope Apple has some big Safari update to announce at tomorrows event. Because if they don’t, the mobile internet that Apple claims to own, will quickly become Palms! If this video turns out to be the real deal, then this will surely be a blow to Apple.
Source: Mac Daily News, Cnet
Flash is the latest craze these days. The iPhone, among others are constantly knocked for not including flash. The few phones that brag of their flash content don’t do all that well in handling it because flash isn’t built for mobile browsers. This means that often flash content won’t scale appropriately as well choppy playback because flash is pretty CPU intensive. There is another option. Animation and 3D support in CSS! And guess what, the iPhone and iPod touch already have it included in mobile Safari. Want to see what I mean? In order to check out a few of the live demos get either a nightly webkit build or just use your iPhone or iPod touch check out a few live demos of what CSS and webkit can do at:
The only problem is flash is extremely common place in the wild web. Animation and 3D through CSS not so much. But adoption is slowly gaining. Hopefully more people hop on the bandwagon as it opens a ton of new doors for mobile web development!
Source: Macrumors, the iPhone Blog
