1. One of the oldest Symbian applications which has survived till this day since the old EPOC days. Opera internet browser.

2. For modern Symbian smartphones, users have the opition to install the native version of this excellent internet browser, also known as Opera Mobile. Or install the J2ME version called Opera Mini.

3. Opera Mobile 10 and Opera Mini 5 have been developed for months. Users are invited to experience the beta since late 2009 and last week, Opera Software announced the availability of both applications it their final versions.

4. The final version of Opera Mobile 10 comes with the following features (among others) :-
- Visual speed-dial
- Multiple tabs with number indicator
- Opera Turbo
- Opera Link
- Presto rendering engine
- Download manager
- Cool user interface for easy navigation to contents
- Kinetic scrolling

5. The final version is also more capable and stable than previous Beta test version.

6. I noticed faster loading of pages and faster kinetic scrolling, as well as supporting full Opera Link which makes it in a class of it’s own.

7. As a fan of Opera products (Opera Desktop, Opera Mobile, Opera Mini, Opera Link & Opera Turbo), I am satisfied with what Opera Mobile is capable of.

8. For some people, they will compare Opera Mobile with the built-in S60 Web browser which comes by default in all current Symbian smartphones.

9. And one of the most requested feature in Opera Mobile is the Flash support. For me, Flash sucks! And Opera Mobile is miles ahead of S60 Web.

10. Get the latest version of Opera Mobile and Opera Mini for FREE from the official website :

http://www.opera.com/mobile

2. Version 1.5 is available for S60 3rd Edition and a new public beta for Symbian^1 touchscreen is released.

3. According to them, many features are added and improved. Including :-
- Symbian S60 3rd edition
– Smooth Scrolling: Scroll operations are more fluid.
– Updated user interface for 3rd edition devices.
– Performance tweaks: Many small enhancements for a more robust and faster browsing experience.

- Beta for Symbian S60 5th edition (Symbian^1)
– Finger friendly UI: A new, intuitive, and finger friendly UI for high resolution touchscreen devices provides an easier browsing experience.
– Smooth Scrolling: Kinetic scrolling has been enabled to Skyfire. Pan or flick the screen to move in any direction smoothly on touchscreen.
– Full screen mode: For touchscreen, browse in full screen mode for maximum screen real estate. Bring the controls back by clicking on the corner icon at any time.
– Auto-Rotate: Browse in portrait or landscape mode with a simple change of the device orientation.

4. Sad to say, it’s not entirely true. There are some things that worked out of the box and some other things are still the same sluggish overhyped application.

5. For touch devices, Skyfire 1.5 is hard to use. Doing the most basic stuff such as reading text is a pain using Skyfire. Text is not rendered correctly to fit on the screen. You have to scroll left and right. How can they claim Skyfire is “THE BEST MOBILE BROWSING EXPPERIENCE” if it cant even display text properly? This is too much!

6. It gets more frustrating as you see the checkerboard is displayed all the time. It seems that Skyfire is re-rendering all the elements when you scroll.

7. The kinetic scrolling is a nice addition but you have to do it very carefully because if you flicked your finger wrongly, you will be presented with the checkerboard (again!). Not the content that you want to read.

8. The menu has been redesigned. They are using finger friendly icons now.

9. Overall experience is not so good. Watching multimedia such as Youtube is like watching slideshow.

10. I tested Skyfire using Satio and connected to my 2Mbps WiFi connection. And Skyfire is not performing well.

11. Please Skyfire. Improve your rendering technology. You have a great product but you scored zero in terms of usability. I understand why you include supports for the latest web technology (Flash, Silverlight, AJAX, etc) but please get the basic stuff improved (e.g. text rendering, usability).

12. Get it from http://get.skyfire.com

13. Watch the video below, where they compared Skyfire with S60 Web and Opera Mobile 10.

1. I havent got time to write blogpost about it yet.

2. This alpha version is tested on Satio Yes. I have a Satio with me now. A review unit courtesy of Sony Ericsson Malaysia.

3. Skyfire 1.5 Alpha for S60 5th Edition in my opinion, delivers better web experience compared to Skyfire on non-touch smartphones.

4. Page rendering is considerably faster even on slow EDGE network.

5. But streaming Youtube videos is almost impossible. They looked like slideshow with 4 frames per second.

6. The menu and user interaction is slightly changed, optimised for touch interaction.

7. Checkerboard is still there.

8. The home page is excellent as always.

9. It doesnt eat too much RAM.

10. Hopefully the full version (should be announced sometime this month, January 2010) will be better.

Asri al-Baker

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1. Well, life is beautiful when you have options? Am I right?

2. We are seeing more anda more Symbian applications from the Far East. Which is very good.

3. Go Browser, is another internet browser from comes from China.

4. The user interface is beautiful, with kinetic scrolling, special effects and very nice font used. And it also uses server-side rendering like UC Browser.

5. However, it renders all pages as small screen. There is no page overview and I dont know how to change the views.

6. The biggest let-down, is the language. All the menus, the interface and everything about it are displayed in Chinese. I dont read Chinese so I cant change any settings.

7. However, Go Browser comes with a beautiful visual Menu which will assist users in navigating around the menu as well as browsing the internet.

8. Maybe the target market is the Chinese speaking people. But please, make an English version

9. Go Browser is available for Symbian S60, as well as for Java phones. You can visit http://go.3g.cn/index.html to download the proper version for your phone.

10. What do you think? You want to test another internet browser?

- Asri al-Baker

2. At the same time, there are also other 3rd party internet browsers. These can be native like Opera Mobile 10, Ozone, Skyfire (sucks!) and jB5 browsers. There are also J2ME browsers such as Opera Mini and Bolt.

3. Enter UC Browser, developed by UC Mobile Limited, or Guangzhou Ucfly Company, pretty unknown in the Western World.

4. UC Browser, now at version 7.0 is an internet browser designed for mobile devices and luckily for us Symbian users, they have released a native version (sisx installation) for us to use.

5. It uses server-side rendering which will fetch your data and compress them before sending them to your phone.

6. As a web-browser, UC Browser hosted many features like download manager, multiple window support, small screen view and many more.

7. It is free to use. You have to pay for the data, as usual or you can use it with WiFi.

8. I have used it for a couple of days but I found it not as good as Opera Mobile 10 especially with complex pages that requires javascript. However, UC Browser is faster than Opera Mobile 10 in terms of internet navigation and the UI itself.

9. If you want to test and use UC Browser, you can download it for free from the official download page.

10. Have you tried it yet? What is your opinion? Can it beat Opera Mobile 10?

- Asri al-Baker

2. Opera Mobile 10 Beta 2 has been updated to Build 353. If you are using an older version, you can check the Build number by entering opera:about in the address bar.

3. According to a forum post at Opera Community, the new Build adds S60 native input, much like typing on other S60 applications and it does support T9.

4. The full forum post is reproduced here :

Update to Opera Mobile 10 beta 2 available with S60 native input support

We have now released an updated beta 2 release for S60 with full native input support (also known as FEP support). This means that when typing in Opera Mobile 10, you can use any input mode that is supported on your phone, in the same way as when e.g. typing text messages.

Get the Opera Mobile 10 beta 2 update from www.opera.com/mobile/download , or go to m.opera.com/next/ with your mobile phone. As before, remember to choose the International version if you want support for Asian characters.

Supporting different input types and methods is a complex matter, so we’d appreciate your feedback to improve this further for the next release. Please post all input-related feedback in this thread!
And thanks again for all your valuable input so far

Known issues:
-Not all input modes have a visual indicator.
-For some devices with non-latin input mode, you need to manually set the input language to English to input a web address in the address bar.
-On touch devices, the enter key does not work as an action key. For cases where an action is required (e.g. when adding a bookmark folder), we recommend using the Opera keyboard (available from advanced settings).
-Cut in context menu does not work on keypad devices.
-Some issues when using predictive input in the url field.

5. I have tested it on my E63, and it is very easy to use. To paste text (URL) from the clipboard into the address bar, just highlight the address bar, press and hold the OK (D-Pad center) and a context menu with “Paste” will appear. Really useful!

6. Have you used this latest version yet? If yes, what is your opinion?

7. Point your browser to http://www.opera.com/mobile/download/ or http://m.opera.com/next to download it.

2. For other mobile platforms, such as the iPhone, Evernote is available as a mobile application where users can upload photos, or any files to be viewed later inside Evernote.

3. From this post over at the Nokia Expert, Symbian users can now rejoice because an application for Evernote is being developed and in already reached beta status.

4. The current beta is developed using WRT and it is actually a widget. But it is designed carefully and looks beautiful.

5. Have you tried the application? If yes, what do you think about it?

2. It’s the first (and only) native Symbian application at the moment dedicated to Facebooking. Previously, it’s available for S60 touch only. Now for non-touch.

3. The strength of Symabook is it’s UI. It doesnt follow standard S60 UI at all.

4. The UI is graphically appealing. Where menus and options are presented differently.

5. In this early test version, the developer decided not to put a lot of functions into it. They are rather basic Facebook stuff like Status Update, Friends, and Profile.

6. In terms of usability, currently, it’s not very stable. For example, if you click the menus a few times, Symabook will halt. And brings down the system. I mean, it makes the phone freezes. Have to take the battery out. This happened a few times during my test.

7. Designwise, I kinda like the way Symabook works. It has kinetic scrolling to view long list, photos are rendered clearly, and it’s fast.

8. The UI is one of a kind. Not to say it’s bad or good but it’s different and pretty easy to use once you disassociate it from your normal S60 UI.

9. The information displayed looked like ”floating” on the screen. I dont know how to put it on words but ”floating” is close

10. Have you tested Symabook yet? What do you think? Is it better than the S60 Facebook Widget?

11. If you want to contribute in developing it by giving feedbacks, please download it from : Symarctic Solutions .

- Asri al-Baker

Posted by Wordmobi

2. Today, Opera Software released 2 updates for it’s mobile products.

3. Opera Mobile 10 for Symbian now reached version Beta 2 and Opera Mini 5 also at version Beta 2.

4. Major additional features in this release are Opera Link support and a Download Manager. Other than that, many tweaks has been implemented to make Opera Mobile 10 Symbian uses less memory (RAM).

5. I will report back about the enhancements in both applications after trying them. Phew… Gonna be an interesting day…

1. No keyboard/keypad shortcut for page up, page down, page left & page right. On Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, the shorcut is defaulted to 2 (up), 8 (down), 4 (left) and 6 (right). And Skyfire doesnt allow any customisation in this department.

2. Bad text/font rendering.
Texts are sometimes not properly rendered, not fitted into the reading area. More right-left scrolling is needed. Skyfire needs to implement a more intelligent text reflowing technology to fit texts on the screen reading area. The current one does work okay if the connection is fast but if the connection is slow, the texts are sometimes unreadable. Maybe the font needs to be antialiased? I havent even touch on the font size yet i.e. the font is soo small in the address bar.

3. Checkerboard
Ok. Rendering web-pages nowadays is not easy. Many web technologies and standards need to be taken into account. Occassionally, Skyfire is able to render pages beatifully. Almost desktop-like quality. But when it comes to usability, especially after loading the page for the first time, Skyfire did not load in full. As you scroll down to read the contents, the page is re-rendered. And most of the time, the checkerboard appears. Frustrating… Especially when it needs to load many page elements.

4. Unreliable connection manager. In order to simplify things and making it not complicated, Skyfire’s connection manager is too simple. There are 2 options. ”Change Connection” and ”Remember Last”. There is no way to set a default connection in Skyfire. Sometimes, the connection manager goes into endless loops and failed to connect to any access point. Which will trigger a prompt asking user to close Skifire or try again. Please add a setting to set a default access point.

5. No kinetic scrolling. Using Skyfire to read long pages is painful. It requires scrolling down, left, right. Implementing kinetic scrolling, in my opinion, will make it more useful.

Those are my top 5 things that I hate in the current version of Skyfire S60. I start to like Skyfire and using it more often especially when on high-speed network and I need to access specific pages that need to be loaded in desktop view.

When Skyfire works, using high-speed internet connection (WiFi or 3G), it works brilliantly and is not as bad as I expected. But 80% of the time, it doesnt…

I hope the team behind Skyfire will work harder to iron these issues and add features. It has many potentials and I can see average Joes who does not belong to Geeksland using Skyfire to access their favourite net contents in the future.

- Asri al-Baker