Posts Tagged ‘iphone’

It’s Approved! Apple has approved Opera’s browser: Opera Mini for the app store. I don’t see it available yet looking at the app store on my iPhone but according to Opera, it should show up within the next 24 hours It is available at the app store right now, see below for my first impressions. The browser is supposedly much faster, and as the video below shows can load 5 pages before Safari loads one.

Opera Mini, with more than 50 million users worldwide, enables fast mobile Web browsing by compressing data by up to 90 percent before sending content to the device, resulting in significantly improved page loading. Users of the app will notice an uptake in speed, especially on slower networks such as the 2G Edge network. Surfing the Web with the Opera Mini App on iPhone and iPod touch will also help users save money because of its data compression capabilities. This will hold especially true while the user is incurring roaming charges.

I will edit this post once I am able to get my hands on it and test it out.

EDIT: First Impressions: MUCH faster than Safari, this was immediately obvious. The zoom is a bit strange for the iPhone but still works nicely. Opera automatically sizes paragraphs to fit the screen which makes the page almost broken when you are zoomed out, not a huge deal though. Saving passwords are easy enough. Tabbed browsing is incorporated nicely on this browser.

[Opera] [Thanks to Luke C. for the tip!]

I can hardly keep my excitement in! Microsoft has announced their new and vastly improved mobile operating system called Windows Phone 7 Series (okay, the name is the only thing I am not excited for). This thing is so freaking sweet that I have completely forgotten my dreams of ditching the antiquated iPhone for an Android. Enough of my drooling now, here are some excerpts from a Lifehacker article that goes over this new mobile OS. Did I mention it’s freaking sweet?

The Interface

It’s different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4×4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone’s interface feel staid.

Holy Crap! The Zune Phone!

Microsoft’s vision of Zune is finally clear with Windows Phone 7. It’s an app, just like iPod is on the iPhone, though the Zune Marketplace is integrated with it into the music + video hub, not separated into its own little application. It’s just like the Zune HD, so you can check out our review of that to see what it’s like. But you get third-party stuff like Pandora too built-in here. Oh, and worth mentioning, there will be an FM radio in every phone (more on that in a bit).

Xbox, on a phone

I’ll admit, I very nearly needed to change my pants when I saw the Xbox tile on the phone for the first time. Obviously, you’re not going to be playing Halo 3 on your smartphone (at least not this year), but yes, Xbox Live on a phone! It’s tied to your Live profile, and there are achievements and gamer points for the games you can play on your phone, which will be tied to games back on your Xbox 360.

There is so much more to this, I highly suggest you head to the article and read the full extent of it.

Lifehacker: Windows Phone 7 Series: Everything Is Different Now

Also check out their hands on video of Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7? WP7S? This name sucks..)

Gizmodo: Windows Phone 7 Series Hands-on Pics and Video

The difference between today’s technology compared to even just five years ago is astounding. Here I am, sitting on a train going fifty miles per hour typing out a blog post on my phone that is no more than 3/4" thick (typing on the screen even). After I submit this post it will fly through the air, possibly to a few orbiting space junk, and then back down to earth where it will travel around the world and finally rests in a server somewhere. It then will get pulled from its slumber to travel once again across the globe to find its way to your screen. All of this will happen in less than a second. So shall we start these few bits of ones and zeros on their way? Here we go….