The team at PDAStreet found that Opera Software will be showing a preview of Opera Mobile 9.5 at this year’s Mobile World Congress.
The update is supposed to provide a bunch of improvements to the mobile browsing experience, bringing it closer to that of the desktop. Features such as zooming, saving pages for offline viewing, auto-complete, and a password manager are supposed to be included.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not it can beat Skyfire.
The gang at Brighthand have posted a review of Skyfire, the new PC-like web browser that was announced last week.
At the very beginning, reviewer Ed Hardy calls it “the best web browser for Windows Mobile” he’s ever seen. He goes on to discuss the features of the browser — such as Web 2.0 features like Ajax and Flash; thumbnail and zoom view; SmartFit, which automatically resizes text to fit in your phone’s display; and much more — in exacting detail. He also talks about some of its flaws:
As impressed as I am with Skyfire, I’m not blind to its flaws. However, the vast majority of these I chalk up it currently being a beta.For example, I watched a long clip on YouTube, and after a few minutes the audio and video were slightly out of sync. The application also crashed on me once while I was activating SmartFit. But these are the sort of things I consider “teething pains”, and will likely be cleared up before the full version is available.
All in all, it sounds like quite a browser, and something to look out for.
Skyfire has announced a new web browser for smartphones that gives users the “real web” experience rather than the more stripped-down version mobile users generally experience.
Skyfire has stated that the browser, which is also called Skyfire, will display content such as Flash, Ajax, and Java at the same speed as a PC. This will open sites like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace, and Last.fm to mobile users. It also has features such as bookmarks that open to a specific part of a page, thumbnail and full screen views, and seamless zooming to make mobile browsing easier on the user.
There’s no information available on the proprietary technology behind the browser, but anyone in the US with a Windows Mobile 5 or 6-based smartphone can sign up for a private beta. Other platforms and regions will follow later.