All posts tagged ‘android’

File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Jul
15
2010

Opera Mini 5.1 Lands on Android Phones

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Lovers of Droid phones and tiny browsers with superfast load times can rejoice. The Opera Mini 5.1 browser for Android phones is out of beta and is now available as a general release.

You can download it in the Android Market, or directly from Opera. If you’ve been testing the previously released beta on your Android phone, you can upgrade to the final release within the app.

The newest version of Opera’s browser adds a pinch-to-zoom feature, but it’s not as elegant as what you’d expect if you’re used to iOS apps. A pinch only zooms you into a specific content well and out to the full page. Still, it’s useful enough to say goodbye to the crude magnifying glass zoom-in-and-out behaviors, which I certainly won’t miss.

The default image quality has also been upgraded to better match the higher-resolution screens of newer phones like the HTC EVO and the Droid X. Opera serves pages to Mini users through a network of web proxy servers, and the data arrives compressed. The method speeds up page loads (especially on slow or flaky data networks), but pages come through looking a little crunchy. This update improves the low-quality image issues.

Opera released its Mini browser for iPhone in April, and it was well-received. It definitely sped up the cellular browsing experience on the iPhone for most websites. But it’s still impossible to make Opera Mini your default browser on the iPhone, and Mobile Safari (with its smooth pinch-to-zoom) has Opera beat for more complex sites and pages that require more navigation than simple scrolling.

Opera Mini for Android can be set as your default browser, and the browser also gets a session restore feature for quick recovery after crashes. There’s also a full-screen mode that does away with the chrome and fills the tiny screen with pure gold web content.

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File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Feb
3
2010

Firefox Takes Its First Baby Steps on Android

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A Mozilla engineer has posted the first screenshot of the Firefox web browser running on Android.

Mozilla’s Vladimir Vukicevic is currently working on porting the mobile version of the Firefox browser to Google’s mobile operating system. The first results, seen in the screenshot above, were posted to Vukicevic’s personal blog Tuesday.

This means that, yes, a full, add-on capable version of Firefox will be making its way to Android phones and tablets in the future. Just a few days ago, Mozilla released a version of Firefox for mobiles running Nokia’s Maemo OS.

Vukicevic’s screenshot shows Firefox running in an Android emulator (to make debugging easier, he says) but it works fine on regular Android devices, too. His team has “a ways to go” before the first public alpha release — various input methods like the keyboard and mouse only “sort of work,” to say nothing of a touch screen — but it’s cool to see some progress being made.

More from Vlad’s post:

You’ll note that this is the full Firefox interface, and not the Fennec/Firefox Mobile UI; we’re testing with the full interface because it’s significantly more complex than the mobile UI and stresses Gecko much more. So, if the full UI works, then Fennec should work fine as well. Given the interest in Android on netbook and tablet devices, an updated version of the full Firefox UI might find a home on some of these.

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  • Review: Google Nexus One
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    File Under: Mobile, Software
    Nov
    6
    2009

    Adobe Announces Photoshop for the ‘Droids

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    With Friday’s launch of the the new Motorola Droid and some slick new features in Android 2.0, Google’s mobile operating system is stealing a bit of thunder from the iPhone.

    Now, there’s one more battleground: Photoshop.com, Adobe’s online photo service based around its flagship photo editor, has jumped on the Android bandwagon as well. Adobe released a new Android-based photo app Friday that allows you to edit, view, share and upload images directly from your phone. It works with any photos stored on the phone.

    Photoshop.com Mobile is already available for the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices. It’s a free download on all three mobile platforms. The Android version of Photoshop.com Mobile has all the features found in its Apple-y and Microsoft-y cousins, but it also packs in a few things that can’t be done on the iPhone — like background image uploads, so you can upload an album and still do other things with the images are being transferred.

    As for the editing tools themselves, well… don’t expect “real” Photoshop. But the basic options like cropping, straightening, color corrections and preset image transformations can go a long way toward making your mobile images look much better.

    Adobe has a video overview, but for some reason doesn’t offer any way to embed it. You can check it out on the Photoshop.com Mobile site. Watch for the subtle iPhone snub about midway through the video, when Adobe’s Corey Barker says, “this particular phone has a really cool feature called background processing…”

    If you’d like to give the new Photoshop.com Mobile for Android app a try, head to the Android marketplace.

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    File Under: Browsers, HTML5, Mobile
    Oct
    27
    2009

    Android Gets a Better Browser, Now With More HTML5

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    Android got a boost Tuesday when Google announced its Android SDK now supports version 2.0 of the open-source platform for mobiles.

    There’s a whole mess of new features in Android 2.0 (aka “Eclair”) but the big news for Webmonkeys is the enhanced WebKit-powered browser.

    The Android browser gets an updated UI — tap the address bar for instant searches, double-tap to zoom in on content wells — and better bookmarks that incorporate thumbnail images of the pages.

    Also included is support for several of HTML5′s APIs for building next-gen web apps: the Geolocation API, the Database API for managing client-side SQL databases and data caching support for offline application access.

    There’s also support for HTML5′s <video> tag — the browser can play videos in fullscreen mode without plug-ins.

    Read about the enhancements at the Android Developers blog, where the Eclair update was announced. There’s also a page listing all the highlights found within.

    And there’s this sexy video:

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    File Under: Mobile
    Nov
    25
    2008

    Mobile Browsers Deserve Location Data

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    How come my desktop browser can get my location, but mobile Safari on my iPhone acts as if it doesn’t know where I am? I hate to seem impatient, but there is a proposed geolocation standard. Mobile browsers should adopt it swiftly.

    The mobile web is here. The iPhone and Android are going to duke it out, and the end result will be more users. Facebook’s mobile visitors have tripled in the last year. That’s a lot of mobile browsing.

    If the location-aware services are going to be as disruptive as everyone has said, these devices need to get better at sharing the information available within them. Yes, Android and iPhone both have apps. But we shouldn’t need to wrap our web projects in an app just to access the coordinates.

    The Geode plugin for Firefox and its presence as a full feature in the browser’s most recent beta have proven it’s reasonable to include it even on a non-mobile machine. Despite the flakiness of WiFi-based geolocation, innovative sites have incorporated the technology. You can shout your whereabouts or tie files to a location all with the help of browser-based geolocation. Of course, we have a Geode/Gears geolocation tutorial so you can incorporate it, too.

    But we really want it incorporated in mobile devices, so we’d be able to see some real innovation. Location-based services are at the horse and buggy stage right now. Let’s give it an engine.

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