Posts Tagged ‘app’

It is sad news for Opera fans. The Apple App Store has rejected the Opera Mini application developed by Opera engineers for the iPhone. It has been rejected on the grounds of duplicating functionality. Apple executives claim Opera Mini is similar to the Mobile Safari on the iPhone. The features of the Mobile Safari are simply fantastic.

Users of the iPhone can pinch-in/double click to zoom out and pinch-out/double click to zoom in,. Users can open upto eight tabs on their screen and can use as a Word/Excel document and PDF reader. The Mobile Safari is actually the fastest mobile browsers available in the market. Users feel that they should be provided the opportunity to try out other web browsers on their iPhone so they can have a totally new web browsing experience.

The Opera Mini web mobile browser is very popular and is already available on many smartphones, like the HTC P3450, but Apple simply would not allow it to be featured on its iPhone. The Opera Mini mobile web browser has the capacity to interpret codes and this is something Apple will not allow on its iPhone. The Opera Mini can be run on any operating system like Symbian, Windows Mobile and even low-end systems that run only Java-based applications.

Not only is it easy to install, it is also intuitive. That is what makes it a favorite contender as an alternative web browser for the Safari on the iPhone. While many users of the iPhone feel tat Apple should allow Opera Mini on the iPhone, Apple does not think so and has categorically rejected the proposal.

The Apple App Store is receiving more and more third party web browsers everyday. All the browsers have got a unique set of features. Some claim to be the most speedy web browsers, some boast of extra functions they offer to the user and some endorse simplicity at its best. The Full Screen Web Browser (FSWB) is the latest third party application released for the iPhone.

The speciality of FSWB is that it uses each and every pixel of the iPhone’s 480×320 display to display the web page. Of course, owners of the Apple iPod touch can also make full use of the browser’s capabilities. You may wonder that such full screen browsers have already been released but unlike them the FSWB does not sacrifices address bar and navigation bar. It displays the address bar and a translucent navigator at the bottom but these two options are automatically hide after few seconds. Shake your iPhone and the accelerometer will bring these two items again on the screen. The makers of FSWB claim that it increases the display area by 25 percent in portrait mode as compared to Safari browser. In landscape mode the viewable area extends by 40 percent that leverages web surfing.

Performance wise the FSWB is same as Apple Safari. This is because the Full Screen Web Browser is based on the safari’s WebKit engine. In order to incorporate stringent security parameters the history option is not included in FSWB. So you have to type full URL each time you visit a web page. You have to sacrifice tabbed browsing too if you wish to use FSWB.

Hot Browser is another third party application that claims itself as the best alternative to the Apple iPhone’s default web browser named Safari. The main attraction of the hot Browser is that it is sensitive to the shakes. Whenever the user shakes the iPhone this browser loads a random web page automatically. The basic idea is same as of Sony Eicsson’s walkman phones, like the Sony-Ericsson W910i, in which every time the user shakes the mobile phone the music gets changed randomly.

Hot Browser may sound good and interesting but practically it is of no use. Most of the time the web site that gets loaded in response to the shake is boring and repeats itself a lot. Most of the users have noticed that there are six main websites that gets loaded and out of them two web sites are related to the programme’s author, i.e. Mark Schmatz IT. The remaining web sites are related to Ruby programming language and German language. So if you are thinking of getting YouTube movies, Yahoo, Google, MySpace or something like that then the Hot Browser is ready to disappoint you. Moreover all the basic web browsing tools like forward/backward buttons, history, bookmarks and preferences are absent.

The Hot Browser is more like an experiment with the iPhone rather than an effective alternate to the Safari browser. Alas! One more third party application seems to loose.

WebMate is the new third party web browser for Apple iPhone that is available for $0.99 at the App Store. The best part of this mobile browser is the ability to support tabs. This means that when you click on a hyperlink the WebMate does not reload the existing web page, instead it open opens the linked content in another window and the user can easily shift between different windows via a counter displayed at the bottom of the screen.

The user interface is good and easy to operate. If you want to close any window then simply use the little trash icon at the bottom of the screen. If you usually click on loads of links while browsing or a hardcore fan of Mozilla Firefox then this one is for you. One of the greatest strengths of the iPhone, as compared to other internet surfing capable phones, like the HTC Touch HD, is the selection of web browsers that the user is offered. Instead of being relegated to one single browser, the iPhone gives users the ability to choose their favourite, just like with a regular computer.

Of course, using WebMate, instead of the default Safari on iPhone, does have its flaws. One of these is that it does not saves the content of the opened tab. This means that whenever you switch from one window to other the whole web page will be reloaded again. This ultimately slows down web browsing and sometime frustrates the user if he is in hurry. Another issue with WebMate is that it do not offer core features like bookmarks, auto complete, and history.