After our initial hands-on with the N900 – the video and gallery of which you can see here – we spent some more time playing with the Maemo 5 smartphone at Nokia World this week. Our initial enthusiasm has been tempered a little by some of the real-world compromises that blending a smartphone and an Internet Tablet demand, though we’re still looking forward to a full review unit; check out our hands-on impressions after the cut.
Video demo after the cut
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Verizon are reportedly looking into ways in which subscribers without data plans can be prevented from loading up their handsets' web-browser, after recognising that it was too easy to do so accidentally and be charged $1.99 each time. According to carrier spokesperson Tom Pica, "it is obvious to [Verizon] that we need to fix this aspect of our service."
RIM have acquired Torch Mobile, the software developers behind the WebKit-based Iris Browser. The move will see Torch Mobile’s developers working to deliver a new browser to BlackBerry handsets; WebKit is the engine underlying the iPhone’s Mobile Safari and the rendering core of Android handsets. It follows RIM’s revelations that it plans to put full Flash onto its handsets.
The browser cycle continues, with Mozilla next to announce an update of their open-source app. Firefox 3.5 brings with it the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, said to be more than twice as fast as in v3.0 and ten times faster than Firefox 2, together with native integration of Ogg Theora video, and Location Aware Browsing.
Video overview after the cut
After Apple made such bold claims about Safari 4 during their WWDC keynote last week, it was only a matter of time until another browser company came along and claimed to “reinvent the web”. Opera have done just that with Opera Unite, a cloud-based system integrated with the company’s browser, that synchronizes user data – including files, music, photos and notes – and makes it available to any internet-connected browser.
Video demo after the cut
It wasn’t all hardware at Apple’s WWDC 2009 event: Safari 4, the company’s browser, finally came out of beta, and Phil Schiller saved some fighting talk for all web rivals. According to Apple, Safari 4 is 7.8x faster than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, and passes all 100 of the Acid 3 tests while IE8 languishes behind at 21/100.
We’ve talked about cloud computing numerous times here on SlashGear, but the latest news in the world of the “cloud” is pretty interesting. iCloud is an operating system that actually runs within your web browser. And though it’s only in beta at the moment, the results look promising.
Google’s Chrome browser turned a lot of heads when it first launched back in September 2008, and the search giant surprised even more people by dropping the beta tag from the browser only a few months later. Now there’s news of a new version of Chrome, still free and back with beta status, but reportedly between 25- and 35-percent faster than previously, depending on benchmarking. There are also new features like side-by-side tab views and autoscrolling.
If you’ve not been keeping up with our sibling site Pre Community, you might not know that we shot a full 26-minute demo video of the Palm Pre at Mobile World Congress. All the main functionality is covered: calendar, mail, Synergy synchronisation with Exchange, GMail and Facebook, and more.
26 minute Palm Pre video demo after the cut!
Take one E Ink AM300 prototyping kit, combine it with a build of Mozilla’s new Fennec mobile browser, and this is what you get: a touchscreen demo of web surfing on an e-ink device. It’s the work of Jaya Kumar, who loaded Fennec into the AM300’s Linux-based Gumstix controller and, with only a little modification, has a usable browser.
Check out demo videos of the e-ink Fennec setup after the cut
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