Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

The product pages don't say much about the new version, but I found this in the press release, with my comments:

• Content download: 1.0 didn't support any kind of file downloading. This still won't work on all phones with Java, as the PDA API is required. All newer phones should have it though.
• New skins: I like the Snow skin. A no-nonsense out-of-the-way color scheme. Interestingly when changing skin you always go online to download a new one.
• Multisearch: Not just Google anymore, and you can add your own search engines.
• Speed dial: I would rather call it speed navigation. This feature doesn't seem well thought out though, as you don't see the "speed dial" numbers until you scroll over a link/feature, and it's only supported on the Mini home page. It would be more useful if supported on any web page.
• Visual navigation: It pans the page content when you move back and forth in the page history list. More of a look-n-feel feature than adding anything really new.

I noted there are now more font sizes. The ones in 1.0 were simply too small for newer high resolution displays.

Narrow/smart rendering is still the only rendering mode supported. There's no possibility to view the web page in 2 dimensions, not that that works very well on a phone, but it would be a nice alternative for more complex multi-column pages.

I will check the mobile commerce feature further, and will probably report back on that later.

Press Release

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