It's a big news day in the mobile world today with Nokia announcing a netbook, Spinvox spokesman and well known mobile blogger James Whatley leaving the beleaguered company and Google openning submissions for the second Android Developer Challenge.
Somewhat lost in the flurry of news were a couple of other stories that I think will have a big long term impact on the way we develop for and use our mobile devices.
First up, TorchMobile announced that they have been acquired by RIM. This is significant because Torch's main product is Iris, a Webkit based direct browser for Windows Mobile 5 and 6. I've never been a WinMo user and I haven't heard much about Iris, but the feature set, which includes a widget engine and support for the W3C Geolocation API, HTML5's canvas tag (graphics and embedded video) and client side storage looks very promising. Reviews (by Mobility Site, MobilityNigeria and SmartphoneBlogging) have been positive, if not gushing. RIM has not yet announced the deal, let alone said what their plans are for Iris, but TorchMobile's announcement doesn't mince words saying.
"Our team of developers will join RIM’s global organization and will now be focused on utilizing our WebKit-based mobile browser expertise to contribute to the ongoing enhancement of the BlackBerry® platform."
The company also says that all development and support for the Windows Mobile versions of Iris is ending. If you have a WinMo phone and want Iris, better act fast, the official download page is already gone. You can still find Iris on sites like Rapidshare with a Google search
What does this mean for developers and users? For one thing, except for Windows Mobile, devices on all the major smartphone platforms; iPhone, Symbian, Palm Pre, Android and BlackBerry will soon ship with a Webkit based browser. That should make life easier for developers wanting to bring advanced web apps to mobile devices. And for users it will hopefully mean that more sites and widgets will work on their phones regardless of which platform they are using.
So where does this leave Opera Software, whose Opera Mobile provides the main alternative to Webkit based browsers on advanced devices? Actually I don't think Opera will be hurt by Webkit's ubiquity. First of all, Opera has consistently built what I consider to be better mobile browsers than any of the Webkit implementations. For example, I have never seen a Webkit based mobile browser where the cache worked
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posted by Dennis Bournique
August 24, 2009 @ 5:39 pm
7 View Comments
