Let’s re-cap…We have MiniMo, Opera Mini 4.0, Silverlight, Skyfire, S60 browser, Opera 9.5, Safari and now the Iris Browser, all gunning for position on your mobile device. Do you think this could get confusing for consumers? Probably not – most of them won’t give a hoot what’s under the hood as long as they get to the content they want.
The Iris browser falls into the ‘pure’ category as it’s based on WebKit (as are the S60, Android and iPhone browsers) and doesn’t rely on proxies or remote servers to modify the content.
The Iris Browser is an advanced, high-performance and versatile application that is specifically designed to function in resource-constrained environments. It brings the full Web experience to mobile phones, set-top boxes, mobile Internet devices, portable media players, Ultra-Mobile PCs and other embedded devices – in a fast and user-friendly manner.
The press announcement that brought this browser to my attention is all about Trolltech who will be distributing the browser as part of Qtopia. Trolltech are being acquired by Nokia as I write so I guess there’s some advantages in putting the S60 browser team in contact with the Iris Browser team to enhance the products in both S60 and Iris directions and strengthening it against attack from Intel’s Moblin which is using the Mozilla (Firefox) engine. Oh, one other thing – Trolltech are part of the LiMo Foundation, the organisation that has been working on a unified, open, linux-based mobile phone platform and who have also just made a few interesting press releases. They’ve picked up a lot of new members and they’ve announced a set of new phones. Phew! It’s a highly interconnected connected world of mobile business out there!
As I mentioned the other day when I speed-tested OperaMini, I’m enjoying these proxied, optimised services for their speed and low data rates but a pure browser is an absolute necessity if I need to get work done and its fantastic to see so much effort going into this area.
A preview download for Windows Mobile is available and I’ll test it out as soon as I my wife steps away from her Trinity.
Press release. (Thanks Dawid)
