Prior to this release, Opera aficionados running Android had to use Opera Mini 4.2, which felt flat and outdated next to the stock Android browser and Dolphin. No longer — Opera Mini 5 beta feels snappy and solid and now falls somewhere in between the stock browser and Dolphin.

If you are familiar with a later version of Opera Mini, you’ll have no trouble getting along here. The app opens with a three-by-three home screen of shortcut icons, which the user can program. The bottom of the screen gives you easy navigation options—Back, Forward, Reload, Tabs, and Options. Web pages generally looked very good and many pages loaded on their desktop counterparts instead of the mobile version of the site.

For example, the PCMag.com home page rendered the desktop site instead of our mobile site, something that the regular Android and Dolphin browsers didn’t do in my tests. The pages looked almost as good as the desktop site, but it did not display the page’s Flash and DHTML content.

The settings page in Opera Mini 5 beta displays a deep browser experience. If your data or Wi-Fi is slow, you can choose not to load images, lower the image quality, or just opt for a cramped mobile version of Web sites that only lets you scroll up and down. Also, there are three text sizes to choose from if you prefer a larger or smaller font.

I took note of these settings options right away and changed the app to show fullscreen only, which hides page description at the top of the screen and the icons at the bottom of the screen. You can then pop up and hide the navigation icons by pressing the Menu button on your Android phone. Fullscreen mode, especially with the Android device flipped horizontally, makes the app replicate the desktop browsing experience fairly well. [PC Magazine]

You might also like:

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Google’s offering is in the cloud, which has a lot of benefits which it mentions in the video above including:

• Search in plain English (watch video). No need to know the address. You can type a business name or even a kind of a business, just like you would on Google.
• Search by voice (watch video). Speak your destination instead of typing (English only): “Navigate to the de Young Museum in San Francisco”.
• Traffic view (watch video). An on-screen indicator glows green, yellow, or red based on the current traffic conditions along your route. A single touch toggles a traffic view which shows the traffic ahead of you.
• Search along route (watch video). Search for any kind of business along your route, or turn on popular layers such as gas stations, restaurants, or parking.
• Satellite view (watch video). View your route overlaid on 3D satellite views with Google’s high-resolution aerial imagery.
• Street View (watch video). Visualize turns overlaid on Google’s Street View imagery. Navigation automatically switches to Street View as you approach your destination.
• Car dock mode (watch video). For certain devices, placing your phone in a car dock activates a special mode that makes it easy to use your device at arm’s length.

But, it also has one obvious monster drawback. When the network is out, the app is useless.

As someone who uses AT&T’s network and tries to get by with Google Maps on the iPhone, I can tell you that more often than not, I can’t get a signal on the road.

And the points which you can’t get a signal are the times when you need the GPS the most. My AT&T signal is almost always non-existant along backroads in unpopulated areas (though I can’t get an AT&T signal anywhere near my home 15 miles from New York City). That’s why fully downloadable maps navigation applications like TomTom still are pretty useful – at least on AT&T/iPhone.

Now, Verizon’s network might be a different story. We’ve all seen the commercials that show their coverage being many times better than AT&T’s. Maybe their network could yield a more positive experience with this type of application that AT&T’s.

It is interesting to note that Google plans on bringing their mapping technology to other GPS platforms including the iPhone (if Apple let them). Perhaps stand alone TomToms and Garmins will soon have google functionality built in.

Oh and for you international readers, Droid is also a GSM platform and should be showing up globally very soon.

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* » Phones

Map Wars Begin: Google Introduces GPS App for Android, More to Enter Fray
Google introduces amazing GPS Navigator for Android 2.0, others coming

Seth H. Weintraub, Computerworld
Oct 29, 2009 10:06 am

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Google today introduced a beta of their navigation app for the Android 2.0 powered Motorola Droid. The application is an extension of its Maps.app for Android but it has a lot of the qualities of personal navigation software products from TomTom, Navigon and Garmin.

Google’s offering is in the cloud, which has a lot of benefits which it mentions in the video above including:

* Search in plain English (watch video). No need to know the address. You can type a business name or even a kind of a business, just like you would on Google.
* Search by voice (watch video). Speak your destination instead of typing (English only): “Navigate to the de Young Museum in San Francisco”.
* Traffic view (watch video). An on-screen indicator glows green, yellow, or red based on the current traffic conditions along your route. A single touch toggles a traffic view which shows the traffic ahead of you.
* Search along route (watch video). Search for any kind of business along your route, or turn on popular layers such as gas stations, restaurants, or parking.
* Satellite view (watch video). View your route overlaid on 3D satellite views with Google’s high-resolution aerial imagery.
* Street View (watch video). Visualize turns overlaid on Google’s Street View imagery. Navigation automatically switches to Street View as you approach your destination.
* Car dock mode (watch video). For certain devices, placing your phone in a car dock activates a special mode that makes it easy to use your device at arm’s length.

But, it also has one obvious monster drawback. When the network is out, the app is useless.

As someone who uses AT&T’s network and tries to get by with Google Maps on the iPhone, I can tell you that more often than not, I can’t get a signal on the road.

And the points which you can’t get a signal are the times when you need the GPS the most. My AT&T signal is almost always non-existant along backroads in unpopulated areas (though I can’t get an AT&T signal anywhere near my home 15 miles from New York City). That’s why fully downloadable maps navigation applications like TomTom still are pretty useful – at least on AT&T/iPhone.

Now, Verizon’s network might be a different story. We’ve all seen the commercials that show their coverage being many times better than AT&T’s. Maybe their network could yield a more positive experience with this type of application that AT&T’s.

It is interesting to note that Google plans on bringing their mapping technology to other GPS platforms including the iPhone (if Apple let them). Perhaps stand alone TomToms and Garmins will soon have google functionality built in.

Oh and for you international readers, Droid is also a GSM platform and should be showing up globally very soon.

Adsense geolocation advertisements will undoubtedly start appearing in this navigation at some point, making it a money-maker for Google. But in the meantime, Google’s Navigation looks to differentiate the Droid from other smartphones out there, most notably, the iPhone. [PC World]

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They’re probably right. They probably are all great. But how am I, as a lay consumer, going to figure out which one to use?

More particularly, how will developers decide which platforms to target?

After all, everyone wants to be a platform these days. Does that mean that no one is?

Developers may be spoiled for choice, but “choice” in this case may not be what they want. Developers need to feed their families and will follow the money. Money is more easily made when choice is manageable (which is a euphemism for “limited”).

This means we’ll see plenty of application developers remain with Apple (though it’s debatable whether the iPhone is the land of milk and honey for anyone but Apple), but we’ll also continue to see a stampede to Google Android.

At present, every other mobile platform is playing for third place, but this could change: Symbian, as a foundation, is in a good position to launch an effective challenge to both Apple and Google if it can get its marketing and execution right.

Outside of mobile, it’s unclear what role app stores will play. It’s nice that Google Wave is getting an app store, but it’s just one more “forge” among many. Every vendor (my employer, included) seems to feel an irresistible urge to create a forge/app store where third-party developers can “add value” to their “platforms.”

Do we really need these? Or do we need more general repositories like Google Code and SourceForge?

I wish I had a definitive answer. I’m just not sure that these competing app stores do anything more than appeal to vendor vanity, and they could end up causing customer confusion.

As a consumer, I don’t want to have to think about sorting among competing app stores. I just want applications.

Presumably, if I use a Sony Ericsson phone, I’ll automatically find myself within its app store (unless my wireless provider doesn’t slot me into its app store first, that is). But if that’s the case, what’s the point of making a big deal over a glorified catalog of applications that work with my given device/software/etc.?

It strikes me that app stores, like the cloud, are simply a way to dress up old ideas. If they help to organize potential buyers and sellers of software, great. But I still think I’d prefer meta-repositories of applications, similar to SourceForge, than individual application repositories for every single device or piece of software that I happen to buy.

How about you? [CNET]

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Google Maps already has 50 million active users across various mobile phones, says Google. But what users have today isn’t even close to the new Navigation product.

First off, it’s connected, which puts it ahead of all but a tiny percentage of in-car navigation systems which have no Internet connectivity (Dashis a notable exception).

The application is also completely free. So all those paid navigation apps (Navigon, TomTom, CoPilot, MapQuest, GoKivo and Sygic Mobile) are at an immediate disadvantage.

But even if Google charged for this app, it would still win hands down. The features include easy search (no need for address), voice search, traffic information (from data sources and crowd sourced from app), and street view close up pictures when you get near your destination. And the car dock mode gives bigger, simpler icons and auto-voice mode (see video):

Search in plain English. No need to know the address. You can type a business name (e.g. “starbucks”) or even a kind of a business (e.g. “thai restaurant”), just like you would on Google.

Search by voice. Speak your destination instead of typing (English only): “Navigate to the de Young Museum in San Francisco”.

Traffic view. An on-screen indicator glows green, yellow, or red based on the current traffic conditions along your route. A single touch on the indicator toggles a traffic view that shows the traffic ahead.

Search along route. Search for any kind of business along your route, or turn on popular layers such as gas stations, restaurants, or parking.

Satellite view. View your route overlaid on 3D satellite views with Google’s high-resolution aerial imagery.

Street View. Visualize turns overlaid on Google’s Street View imagery. Navigation automatically switches to Street View as you approach your destination.

Car dock mode. For certain devices, placing your phone in a car dock activates a special mode that makes it easy to use your device at arm’s length.

Here’s Navigation in the Droid dock, followed by an image gallery for the app:

Video Demo Of Google Maps Navigation

[TechCrunch]

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Google gets this. While Google has long embraced open source like Linux and MySQL to give it flexible, low-cost technology with which to scale out its operations, the company has dramatically increased its open-source developer outreach in the past two years. And while some companies dribble out open source at the edge of their operations, Google is releasing core software like Wave and Android for open-source communities to help develop and shape.

The result? A loud and loyal following. Google may not get much in the way of quality external contributions from these efforts (It’s still too early to tell.) But the strategy is already paying for itself in terms of marketing, if nothing else.

Hence, while Microsoft’s mobile software has stalled for years and recently dropped to 4 percent, according to CNET’s report on recent AdMob data, Google Android jumped from 2 percent to 7 percent in just six months.

That’s the power of community.

It’s a community that Microsoft arguably has in the enterprise, but which it emphatically lacks on the Web. Facebook-style developers simply don’t think of coding in Microsoft’s .Net. They write LAMP applications. To match this, Microsoft is going to need to join the open-source party.

Microsoft is slowly getting the message. For example, the company has been optimizing Web technology like open-source PHP to run well on Windows. More interestingly, Microsoft’s experimental Barrelfish multicore operating system has been released under a highly permissive BSD-style open-source license.

The use of a BSD-style license suggests Microsoft is serious about adoption of the project, and of generating trust with developers. Developers can take BSD-style code and do pretty much whatever they want with it, with no permission required and no oversight exercised by Microsoft. It’s a great move.

Microsoft needs more of this.

The company recently saw its open-source chief leave Redmond for a Silicon Valley cloud start-up. Such movement, from Microsoft to cloud/Web-based computing, is well under way and something that Microsoft can only halt if it starts to play the same game as its competitors.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seems to think the key to competition is features (in IE8 and elsewhere). It’s not. That’s just a start.

The key is encouraging and harnessing the power of community. Microsoft, which has done this so effectively in the enterprise, needs to learn to do this on the Web, too, which is tantamount to saying that Microsoft must fully embrace open-source development. [CNET]

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Predictably, Apple’s iPhone is credited with igniting the growth of smartphones, and it’s the clear leader of the pack. The survey found that the iPhone has the most loyalty and praise among its users, with 92 percent of iPhone owners saying they have the ideal phone. Around 90 percent have recommended the device, while 35 percent said they bought the iPhone based on word-of-mouth advice.

The iPhone also is tops in customer satisfaction, ranking 83 on a 100-point scale, according to CFI. The newer Palm Pre and Android-based phones each scored 77 on the scale, followed by Research In Motion’s Blackberry at 73 and the Palm Treo at 70. The rest of the pack, including phones running Windows Mobile and Symbian, trailed the list with an overall grade of 66.

“The iPhone is the best thing to happen to the smartphone industry because it captured the imagination of a whole new set of consumers that might not have made the smartphone jump,” said Doug Helmreich, program director with CFI Group.

But the growing dependence on smartphones is a catch-22, since consumers now demand more from their devices. And wireless carriers, most notably AT&T, have struggled to provide the quality of service that people want. For this reason and others, the survey found a disparity between the most popular smartphones and the most popular providers.

Of the pack, Verizon Wireless was considered the ideal carrier among 86 percent of users questioned, and it scored 79 out of 100 for customer satisfaction. But only 38 percent of Verizon consumers said their phone is the ideal smartphone, the lowest among all carriers.

For AT&T, the situation is reversed, but more among iPhone users. Half of all iPhone owners surveyed said they would like to jump ship to another provider, but 75 percent of non-iPhone users said they would stick with AT&T. For customer satisfaction, AT&T scored 69 out of 100 among iPhone users, and 73 among non-iPhone owners. [CNET]

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While I only used the Cliq briefly, I could tell already that I liked its design best out of all the Android phones out there. Like the G1, it has a keyboard and a touch screen. A physical keyboard is necessary as the native touch keyboard on the current version of Android is far from perfect (as we found out in our review of the T-Mobile myTouch and the HTC Hero).

The Cliq’s keyboard is even better than the G1’s, though. For one, the keys are more raised and easier to press than the G1’s. The Cliq also doesn’t have that annoying inset as seen on the G1. Other things we liked about the hardware: The gorgeous 3.1-inch touch screen (which showcases the MOTOBLUR UI beautifully), the 3.5-mm headphone jack and the 5-megapixel camera.

The Motorola Cliq will also be the first phone to showcase MOTOBLUR, Motorola’s skin for Android. While Android is easy enough to use, it lacks the aesthetics and slickness of some other OS’s. MOTOBLUR to the rescue: The UI is clean and intuitive and isn’t overdone with too much fluff. It is also highly customizable and doesn’t look like any OS out there. I’m curious to see how it stacks up to HTC’s UI on the Hero, which also impressed us. [MacWorld]

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