Opera finally updated their Opera Mini browser to 5.0 (beta) and released it for the public today.

New features:

1. Sleek design — Opera Mini 5 features a new, intuitive and advanced look and feel.
2. Tabbed browsing — This desktop favorite is now available for Opera Mini. Tabs allow users to browser several sites simultaneously. This helps users easily jump from one page to another with the click of a tab.
3. Touchscreen or keypad browsing — Opera Mini caters to the needs of your phone, offering optimal browsing for both touchscreen and keypad-based phones.
4. Password manager — Opera Mini is a virtual memory bank, securely saving all passwords for e-mail, social-networking sites, online banking and more.
5. Speed Dial — This is our take on a table of contents for your Web adventure. Opera’s Speed Dial will greet you with your pre-selected Internet favorites upon loading the browser.

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According to a blog entry from Opera , The next generation in mobile browsing which was announced @ the new Opera next page is related to Opera Mini 5. No other details are revealed as of now. I am sure we will be learning more about this in the coming days.

When I hear of browsers on Windows Mobile , the names that come to my mind are Skyfire and Opera. Dorothy and Fennec are possible future contenders to this list.

Good news is Skyfire hits version 1.1, do I hear you asking whats new ?

• Improved page load times. For sites that take a long time to load, we updated our algorithm to bring you the content much quicker.
• Improved scrolling and zooming on Symbian. This is a much faster and smoother experience now.
• Improved reconnect. Skyfire will show clearly when you can start interacting with the web page in case it previously timed out and disconnected (to save battery life).
• WML support. If you are browsing to mobile sites that use the old mobile WML markup, you can now view the content.
• Improved mobile website support. Mobile.* websites are now rendered automatically as mobile with the exception of mobile.yahoo.com since it is a PC site.
• Page up/down navigation via short-key: You can use now ‘2’ and ‘8’ to easily navigate one page up or down. Great for reading articles. Now the short-key for invoking the Superbar is ‘*’. Please note that on some devices with a non-standard keyboard layout, short-keys may behave differently since this is phone specific.
• Updated Plug-ins: For Flash, Silverlight and QuickTime we have the newest versions to give you more compatibility with more sites.

[ via MoDaCo ]

More info about this version

Dorothy. Quite an interesting name for a web browser, don’t you think? Well, it is the latest of several web-kit based mobile web browsers for Windows Mobile and it’s recently been released for beta testing. Since Dorothy is fairly early in development, it’s not packed with too many features. It currently logs history, saves bookmarks, has zooming and support for landscape mode. You can grab it by signing up for the beta on their site.

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One of the advantages of using a Windows Mobile device is that we have many choices of web browsers. Opera, Opera Mini, Iris, Skyfire, IE, and now Bolt is nicely progressing to be a very useful browser.

Bolt is a free web browser that offers an uncompromised browsing experience, even on lower-end mobile phones. The latest beta adds copy/paste, various font support, the ability to upload files to sites and more. Deciding which browser to use just became harder, so test it out and see if it’s to your liking.

Note: You will need JAVA on your device.

LIGHTNING FAST MOBILE BROWSING

- Routinely loads pages at least 25%-50% faster than competing mobile browsers
- Patented navigation and display technologies get you where you’re going faster

WATCH. CONNECT. SURF.

- View streaming videos
- Enjoy all the features of your favorite social networking site
- Subscribe to RSS feeds
- Shop securely
- Browse any website

UNCOMPROMISED WEB EXPERIENCE

- Full desktop PC-style browsing on all types of mobile phones
- Web content is never reformatted, repurposed, or removed

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Torch Mobile has released an important update for their popular browser, Iris. Now that it has reached version 1.1.9, we are seeing many enhancements and features. Some may be sad to see such features like the “ripple effect” go, but others will be happy to see fixes for flash and the implementation of a media player plugin. It is important noting that the new multimedia features are still rather early in development, but nevertheless, they still work. View the recent changelog below.

Changes:

- Improved canvas support – curves, transparency fixes, and more
- Application cache support
- Some networking and javascript fixes
- Flash reliability fixes
- The link click animation has been removed, by popular request
- A security fix in SVG support
- Preliminary RTSP support and a Windows Media plugin. Also the beginning of HTML5 audio/video support (more to come here)
- Fixes for various iPhone sites, including Google calendar and reader

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A new version of Skyfire is available now. With skyfire on your phone, you can watch any video, connect with friends, listen to music, shop, and browse the web using the full-featured PC versions of your favorite websites. With Skyfire, mobile browsing just works – speedy page loads, full video, images and audio.

What’s new in this 1.0 update?
* Reduced Memory footprint. We reduced the memory footprint of Skyfire for both Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. This should help folks reporting issues on memory constrained devices.

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After a month of their release for Alpha 1, Mozilla is back with its alpha 2. With Opera & Skyfire is almost ready with their paradigmatic shift releases, Fennec seems to have been determined to give them a real fight.

Here are some of the changes that Mozilla has claimed to brought in this new release:
-Improved panning performance
-Newly designed theme
-JavaScript error console is now built in
-Improved add-on support
-Numerous bug fixes
-Improved UI polish

Although we do find some bugs even now which prohibits us from making it our default browser, as the way we have it on our PC. But nevertheless we do expect Mozilla to come out with all those fixes in their next version. Till then check out this!

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According to gizmodo.com the new Samsung JET is said to have a new in house developed browser called Dolphin.

Features of this new browser include

• easy, super fast surfing
• multi-window browsing to surf several web pages simultaneously – up to five pages at any one time.
• book marking widget to save your favourite websites
• the multiple background download
• multi-purpose address field
• ad-blocker
• etc

And now the all important question , Will us Windows Mobile Users get this browser on the Windows Mobile flavored devices from Samsung? Would you want the Dolphin on your Windows Mobile ?

Iris Browser 1.1.8 is the only WebKit based browser for Windows Mobile users.

Updated Features :

• Improved graphics performance
• Faster networking and loading of local files
• Improved memory usage
• Improved asynchronous behavior while loading pages
• Support for the W3C Geolocation API
• Support for HTML5 SQL databases and client side storage
• Rendering improvements, including for canvas
• CSS transformations and effects
• Improved Thai support
• Right-to-left language fixes
• Many general bug fixes

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