/bin/true

I’ll be brief: try it. I’m loving it so far. How is it this fast? Even Safari 3.1 doesn’t compare.

Link

It’s out and I have downloaded it. I sort of expected the zoomed-out, full-page preview mode. If Nokia, Apple and Microsoft are doing it, I don’t see why Opera shouldn’t. The difference is that while Opera Mobile 9, when launched, will have this functionality, Mini has it now and will work on most any current phone on the planet.

My initial impression is very positive. The beta feels a lot less like a Java application, a lot more ‘native’. The nifty zooming effect is nice, and I’ve always liked the slide-in/out of pages in Mini. Recently, I’ve been using the Nokia browser a lot because of the smooth fonts and the ability to view without compromise. Opera Mini is now on a level playing field, with improved fonts as well. All this in less than 100kb. You have to see it to believe it.

Infosync called it an ‘Underwhelming’ announcement (later changing its tune), while other sources have been even less charitable. Bluntly — if you don’t remember qwk packets, you don’t know how good you have it.

Friends and I have spent years pondering mobile panacea. Often while spending good money looking for it. Michael has had two palm organisers. I have had a Psion Revo+, a couple of S60 phones with an S40 in the middle. My current E61 is the best compromise I’ve used. But it is a compromise.

Back when I used the Revo+, I marveled at just how friendly and sorted it was. Despite being an aged device, it would recognize my IR Nokia, sync phonebooks and send SMS. It had a usable keyboard and even had Opera, albeit unusably slow. Still, it did connect via IR and EDGE to the internet and if only it had a colour screen, a bit more juice, Bluetooth and an SD slot, I’d be set.

The Revo+ died, and with it died the only (IMO) usable pda/handheld I had ever used. It still starts up with some charging, but doesn’t hold charge reliably enough to use. It was a 33mhz device with apps that ran snappier and more usably than my QVGA, 200 mhz, WiFi-enabled smartphone. Before we bought the MacBook, we tried very hard to find a subnotebook-type device that would do word processing and email for a decent price, but there was nothing around.

By now it should be clear that I like the Folēo. It is an idea whose time has come and gone, but a good idea it is. I can’t think of very many mobile use-cases that would not be satisfied with a Folēo and a 3G phone. Instant on, full (mostly) web, email and documents. With Google Docs, i dont even need local storage! I wrote about being disconnected from data earlier. This is a combination that I think would make disconnection work. It remains to be seen if the Folēo has enough horsepower to be a PMP-like device, but I probably wouldn’t use a 10-inch MP3 player anyway.

So you can have your E61, Blackberry, Dash, TyTn, whatever. Everything phone-sized will always be a compromise of screen and keyboard. Just split your devices and you don’t have to deal. At $500 the Folēo isn’t cheap, but compared to the near-$400 phone I typed this on, it compares OK for what it is. You can probably have a Folēo and a 3G phone for under $700 — a lot of money, but it would fit so well in my bag.

Now I will go massage my wrists and thumbs.

Thanks to All About Symbian, I was saved from an unnecessary conspiracy-theory post about Hutch’s WAP proxy (which, incidentally, is from Jataayu). Bloglines has announced that they now use Skweezer to compress all posts read through Bloglines Mobile, thus saving time and money. I’ve tried hard to find a free and feature-rich RSS reader for my mobile, but Bloglines just raised the bar to the point that few come close.

Technorati Tags: hutch, bloglines, wap, mobile, skweezer

I've been awful excited about the 'new' web with all its AJAXy slickness and rounded corners. I'm quite a sucker for nice design. And so it went before with Ruby on Rails and friends. I have Rails installed, I have Camping installed, I use Tracks, but they're not on the disk for the right reasons. I've never done anything useful with any web framework, and today I wrote three lines of Ruby simply because I suck at bash. Still, this excites me, even though I don't know any Java.

Link: Google Web Toolkit – Build AJAX apps in the Java language

Technorati Tags: google, gwt, java, ajax, ruby, rubyonrails, camping, tracks