Mobile Web Browsing- The state of things

Today I decided to start a review that I will occasionally go back to and re-evaluate. The importance of mobile web browsers is becoming something that mobile users cannot ignore. Most non-smartphone/PPC users are not familiar with the options and only know of mobile Safari because of iPhone commercials being pounded into our brains.

WebKit the technology that Safari is based off of is slowly expanding in development land and will eventually be available on all mobile phones. But there are many non-iPhone users like me who need instant satisfaction. http://www.webkit.org

Microsoft, the company known for dissappointing (I am a stockholder, I can say that) has been working on a mobile browser called Deepfish. Having tried it out after waiting months for a activation code I was impressed. It looked as though Microsoft had grasped the idea of "zooming" in to specific locations of a webpage, instead of scrolling. Microsoft, may however leave this as prerelease vaporware-like app because for the past two months Deepfish has been deactivated. That and an ambiguous press release from M$ led msmobiles.com to suppose the project may have been just to test the waters and is now discontinued, but that is just rumor. Keep checking this site for updates. http://labs.live.com/deepfish

Just like the Blackberry browser I don't think there should be any mention of the Pocket IE experience. It has been a fact of life for most WinMo users and is downright depressing to use. Unless you are using a mobile friendly website like, say: http://technofilic.mofuse.com. (shameless plug)

If you don't remember the days before Firefox or Safari then you may have forgotten about a company named Opera. They first introduced tabbed browsing a while back and I was a fan of them on my old Thinkpad. They make two mobile compatible browsers Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. Opera Mobile is ready for any WinMo user to download (.cab) and run and some may see it as an improvement over PIE, to me it's a mess of bad font and awkwardly unfamiliar layout. It lacks the ever important zoom feature that makes Safari king and has kept Deepfish looking promising. Surprisingly it''s little brother Opera Mini that wins my highest praise. It requires a version of Java installed to run, which makes WinMo users have to scour the net, but it is hands down the best web experience. Infact my entire Blog is updated from a WM5 smartphone running Opera Mini 4.

If you need Java, Google: IBM MIDP2
Today Opera Mini 4 came out of beta,
Http://www.operamini.com