There are a lot of programs calling themselves “Web browsers” in the App Store, but almost all of them are lying. Rather than being actual browsers, they’re skins for Apple’s Mobile Safari rendering engine. Opera Mini is different. As a proxy browser, it doesn’t actually load Web pages at all. Rather, it sends a request to Opera’s servers, which loads the page, compresses it by 80-90%, and sends your phone a compressed image of the page.

The result is extremely fast page load times. Opera Mini is faster than Safari even on good 3G; a NYTimes.com page that loaded in 22 seconds on Safari loaded in 10 on Opera, and I saw similar or even better results on other pages.

But on EDGE—or on bad 3G—Opera simply smoked Safari. An Adobe.com page that took a minute and 40 seconds to load with Safari loaded 30 seconds faster with Opera. A NYTimes.com page that took two minutes with Safari took a mere 34 seconds with Opera. Opera made browsing on slow networks possible.

Beyond Speed
The program has some other appealing features beyond speed. Opera Mini starts up to a “speed dial” screen of nine bold, graphical bookmarks. It’s a multi-window browser like Safari, but you don’t have to leave the page you’re browsing to flick through your other windows; they appear in a bar at the bottom of the screen. Settings lets you tinker with your font sizes and synchronize your bookmarks with Opera on the desktop.

But I’m disappointed with the lack of multiple zoom levels and how many of the buttons don’t look like standard iPhone user interface elements. (Copy-and-paste, for instance, works, but the pop-up menu doesn’t look like iPhone copy-and-paste.) Opera Mini has two levels of zoom. Pages start out zoomed way out, to an unreadable level. Tap once to zoom in and center on what you’re tapping on; most text columns are automatically reformatted for the width of the screen.

Opera is for basic Web browsing. It doesn’t support video, audio, or Flash. Fonts seem to be hammered down to a very limited set. Opera can’t handle interactive Web apps like Safari does. Because it’s transferring compressed data, Opera Mini pages are basically static; if you click on a button or pop up a calendar, it often reloads the whole page.

Opera Mini 5 won’t replace Safari. Safari is a more capable browser and is better integrated into the iPhone experience. Rather, Apple approving Opera Mini is a shot at AT&T’s network problems. In a perfect world with perfect networks, iPhones wouldn’t need this browser. But when AT&T fails, Opera Mini will have you surfing while everyone else around you is stuck trying to load pages. That makes it a valuable, if niche, product for the iPhone.

When Opera Software announced late Monday that its Opera Mini browser would hit the iPhone App Store, we guessed it wouldn’t be long before we saw other browser-makers follow suit by producing similar efforts that get around Apple’s restrictions facing iPhone browsers that compete with the native Safari.
Looks like our guess was correct. On Tuesday, Skyfire, another mobile browser maker, blogged a post congratulating Opera for its success and stating Skyfire’s intention to speed up its own development for “iDevices” like the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.
Of course, as a competitor, it is Skyfire CEO Jeff Glueck’s prerogative to point out that Skyfire supports Flash and plays back video with its mobile proxy browser where Opera Mini for iPhone doesn’t.

by pcmag.com and news.cnet.com

Apple Inc. confirmed last night that it is now allowing iPhone, iPad and iPod touch developers to build apps that can make Internet calls over a 3G cellular network.
“We revised our Program License Agreement in conjunction with our updated Software Development Kit for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad Apps,” wrote an Apple spokesperson. “Included in this update is the ability for developers to create VoIP apps that utilize cellular networks.”

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol — essentially, Web-based telephony.

As we reported last night, several VoiP apps have been approved for use on the iPhone, including iCall and Fring.

Skype, one of the most popular VoIP applications, said it had a 3G iPhone app ready to go, but wanted to get a couple of service details squared away.

Skype is waiting for Apple to clarify when the new SDK terms of service for iPhone OS 3.2 SDK beta, which were published yesterday, will go into effect for current iPhone users who are still bound under the terms of iPhone OS 3.12 SDK, according to Skype spokesman Chaim Haas.

“As soon as we have that clarification, Skype will submit its application for approval,” Haas wrote.

Apple announced Wednesday that iPad owners will be able to purchase monthly 3G plans for the device, which is quite a bit larger than a normal cellular phone, but could easily be used to make and receive calls.

Now that Apple and AT&T have green-lighted 3G data calls, iPad owners will not necessarily need an additional voice plan (not that the option for one was announced, but plenty of people were wondering).

In fact, the arrival of VoIP to iPhone may well be the beginning of a long decline for the concept of “voice minutes” — at this point, there’s really no point in differentiating one kind of call from another — it’s all data.

As part of an extensive interview with Wired, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and collaborator Rob Sheridan revealed plans for an upcoming Nine Inch Nails iPhone application that is awaiting approval by Apple. The application is said to utilize the location-based social features found in Twinkle and known as “Nearby”.

The free Nine Inch Nails app, scheduled for release as soon as it gets final approval from Apple, is a mobile window on all things NIN: music, photos, videos, message boards, even — thanks to a GPS-enabled feature called Nearby — the fans themselves.

Nearby is “kind of like Twitter within the Nine Inch Nails network,” says Rob Sheridan, Reznor’s long-time collaborator. “You can post a message or a photo by location, and if you’re at a show you can see conversations between other people who are right there.”
The application will reportedly link with the official NIN.com website and allow fans to upload photos and messages directly to the site, utilizing features of Nearby to make the locations of the content viewable on Google Earth.

The iPhone app takes that a big step further. NIN.com has a Google Earth plug-in that fans can use to see conversations and photos from across the planet, or at a specific location. A feature on the iPhone app’s Nearby tab will enable them to post messages and photos from their iPhones to the website and have them pop up in Google Earth.

Yahoo! is expected to launch a refreshed mobile portal this week. The new portal puts search at the forefront and then allows full customisation so that users can add widgets from third party sites such as Gmail and eBay.

The refreshed mobile portal is likely to replace the current http://m.Yahoo.com portal but not Yahoo!’s oneSearch search engine. Yahoo! is currently in partnership with Nokia and the oneSearch search client is the default setting on many mobile phones.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Kongress in Munich today, Michael Stenberg, Partner Director Central & Eastern Europe, Yahoo! Connected Life, gave the audience a tour of the new portal.

The move is aligned to the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) which the company hopes will encourage developers and publishers to spend more time engaging with the portal. Yahoo! told developers in April 2008 that Y!OS would allow their applications to be distributed via the Yahoo! websites as well as the developers own.

Y!OS has been one of the driving forces behind the removal of Yahoo! social networks Y!360 and Mash as well as the controversial changes to the Yahoo! Profile system. Yahoo!’s goal is to create a single social platform that reaches across Yahoo!’s web and mobile properties.

Skype is keeping mum on the announcement and has declined to comment on the rumors. But the company is hosting a press conference Tuesday afternoon in Las Vegas the day before the show kicks off. And it’s likely the news will be announced there.

Skype admitted earlier this year that it’s working on an application for the iPhone. Scott Durchslag, the company’s chief operating officer, said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January that an iPhone version of the software client would be coming to Apple’s App Store.

“We have to make sure the call quality is there and the application works really well before we can announce the software for any device,” he said in an interview after the company’s press conference. “But we will have something for the iPhone as soon as it’s perfect.”

Skype sees mobile as the next major growth area for its business. Not only does it expect its more than 405 million registered users to take their Skype experience, which offers free and low-cost calling, with them on-the-go, but the company also believes they will be able to reach new users via mobile devices. By putting the peer-to-peer service, which uses the Internet to carry voice traffic, onto a mobile phone, it becomes very convenient to use. The regular Skype service runs on a computer and requires either a special phone or a headset and microphone to make and receive phone calls.

In the U.S. most cell phone plans include domestic long-distance calling as part of a bundle of minutes, so the Skype service isn’t really that appealing. But for subscribers calling outside the U.S., rates can be as much as a $2 a minute if cell phone users don’t subscribe to a special monthly plan for making international calls. This makes the Skype mobile client most appealing to users who want to make inexpensive international calls, but don’t want to be tied to their computers.

A software version of Skype already exists for Windows Mobile phones. Nokia also plans to embed some of its phones with Skype clients. And Skype has worked with a company called iSkoot to develop a special Skype phone that is sold by the cell phone operator Hutchison 3 U.K. A Skype-lite version of the client is also available on some Java phones.

Now, iPhone users will get to use Skype, too. But before iPhone users get too excited, there’s probably a big catch. The new Skype app for the iPhone will likely be restricted to Wi-Fi networks only, as Apple has done to other third-party services like Fring, which offers access to Skype.

If this is the case, it will be a huge limitation to the usefulness of the service. While other mobile phone users can use the Skype service anywhere they can a cell phone signal, iPhone users will be restricted to only using it where they can access Wi-Fi. Most people access Wi-Fi home or in the office, where they’re likely to be near a computer anyway.

by cnet