Samsung has just officially announced the SGH-L870 S60 smartphone. It has a classy stainless steel slider body, housing a 3-megapixel camera, 2.4” QVGA display, 100MB of memory, microSD slot, FM radio and Stereo Bluetooth. On the connectivity side the L870 is a tri-band GSM unit with single band UMTS/HSDPA 3.6Mbps support thrown in too. Not about to set the world alight then, but no slouch either.
That’s the stuffy specs part but the really juicy details about this handset lie in the software. First of all the L870 will run the latest Symbian 9.3 and 3rd Edition of the S60 interface with Feature Pack 2 just like the newest Nokia smartphones, which is certainly welcome.
The real shocker however is that it will come with the Safari browser pre-loaded straight out of the box. Apple has typically held it’s proprietary applications close to its chest, branching out with iTunes (as a means to command the MP3 market beyond people who don’t own Macs) and then with a Windows version of its Safari internet browser. Seeing the company follow down the same route in the mobile space is a little out of the blue, but it is certainly in keeping with the company’s strategies elsewhere.
Indeed, unlike with the PC market, Safari makes a strong case for best internet browser in the mobile market, making it an apt linchpin for Apple to command a slice of market share beyond iPhone sales.
We have to wonder what the mobile Safari browser will be like, sans touchscreen, but either way, this is a bold move.
Last month we had news of a new browser from Wake3 that promised to bring the WebKit HTML rendering engine - as seen in Apple’s Safari - to Windows Mobile.
It looks as though Torch Mobile has beaten them to it. Their new browser - Iris - was announced yesterday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and it looks very promising indeed.
Iris features an implementation of WebKit that offers tabbed browsing, a tweakable interface and multiple zoom modes. Torch say that the browser also comes with integrated anti-phishing and pop-up blocking features as well as support for both key navigation and touch screens.
WebKit itself is one of the most standards-compliant HTML engines around, meaning Iris should be able to give a ‘desktop’ feel to rendered pages without too much effort.
There is no word on pricing as yet (Torch seem to be aiming to get Iris bundled with a few handsets) but a preview version for Windows Mobile 6 is available here.
Well, not Safari as such, but WebKit - the rendering engine that powers Apple’s browser - has been ported to Windows Mobile by Californian developers Wake3.
A rendering engine interprets webpages and displays them to the screen. WebKit is a fast, lightweight engine that powers Mobile and Desktop Safari as well as the Konqueror browser found on many Linux systems.
The basic WebKit is a solid, fast & standards-compliant HTML wrangler, but sadly lacks the tap-to-zoom and smooth scrolling extensions that Apple added to Safari. As you can see from the video below the current alpha version makes heavy use of scroll bars to get around a big page.
Still, its early days yet and it would seem a shame to just slap a clunky interface on qualilty code like WebKit, so fingers crossed that Wake3 are working towards something special.
One of the problems with iPhone’s Safari browser is that you can’t see embedded Flash - for example, if someone’s embedded a YouTube video in their blog. It also means you can’t use some Music 2.0 services which use Flash streaming to deliver music. It’s a right pain in the behind. However, a new bookmarklet called iTransmogrify promises a solution.
Coded by a chap called Joe Maller, it basically converts embedded Flash content into native iPhone formats. He’s making it work with various sites and formats as he goes along, with users queuing up with requests on his own site. It’s certainly an impressive bit of development work, and shown off in the video above.
I can’t help feeling that it should be down to Apple to improve Safari next time it releases an iPhone firmware update, though. With so many Web 2.0 sites using Flash content, there’s no logical reason why iPhone users shouldn’t be able to access them.
iTransmogrify website
With the iPhone’s music capabilities and Safari browser, you’d think there’d be lots of music sites launching iPhone-friendly versions letting you stream tunes to your iPhone. However, it seems there may be a problem here in the UK preventing such services.
It’s been exposed by the BBC’s Radio Labs blog, in a post about the Beeb’s iPhone podcast site (which we’ve covered before). After complaints that some UK users couldn’t play the streaming podcasts, the BBC investigated, and discovered that the problem was related to users trying to stream over O2’s EDGE network:
“After a lot of emails and rooting around for info, it seems O2 have a proxy server that replaces content on the fly to speed up web-over-EDGE performance. This includes downgrading images, and removing any references to Mp3’s - hence the lack of a play button. In the States, there’s no such proxy, so although its slower, US users get the full playback experience.”
Ouch. It works fine over Wi-Fi, but the news isn’t good for Music 2.0 sites looking to target UK iPhone users when they’re not within range of a hotspot.
(via BBC Radio Labs)
If you run a popular website, chances are you’ve already checked how it looks on an iPhone. The vast majority look fine, since the iPhone’s Safari browser is good at its job.
But the smartest companies aren’t settling for that: they’re building iPhone-specific versions of their sites to work with Apple’s touchscreen interface and smaller screen.
Such as? Facebook. I discovered their iPhone version by accident when logging into the main site yesterday - it automatically detects you’re on an iPhone and reroutes you to http://iphone.facebook.com. It’s fantastic.
Continue reading ‘Facebook is the most impressive iPhone-friendly site so far’
Enter the iPhone, then. After months of anticipation, last Friday’s UK iPhone launch went off a bit more quietly than the US one, which I’d put down to us Brits’ natural reluctance to whoop and queue round the block for any piece of new technology (that’s not a games console). Nevertheless, tens of thousands of iPhones were sold over the weekend, with Brits finally getting to grips with Apple’s handset.
Including us. Yes, Pocket Picks has an iPhone, which we’ll be using to cover new applications and services in the coming months, as well as giving our own detailed appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the device - both initially, and over time. We activated it yesterday, and it’s up and running smoothly.
Over the next week and a bit, we’ll be examining its key features and applications, but kicking off now with our first impressions…
Continue reading ‘iPhone UK review Part 1: First impressions and setup’
Opera has just launched the latest version of its mobile browser, Opera Mini 4.0. The browser boasts the ability to bring the web to your handset almost exactly as you would experience it on a PC by way of a zoom function (Opera Zoom) that allows you to home in on the section of the page you are looking at; much like the iPhone’s Safari browser.
Much cleverer than that however is the small screen rendering tech that reduces the size of the page automatically to fit your handset so that pages load more quickly thus costing you less time and money online. Not such a concern in the age of unlimited data plans for mobile browsing but cool nonetheless.
There is of course full support for Opera’s recently launched Opera Link function too, allowing you to synch and organize your bookmarks between the various online devices you use. The new version is available now free from the Opera site or via an over the air download.
(Via Opera)
