(Credit: TiVo)Good news comes to TV-watchers with TiVo DVRs installed in their living rooms. On Wednesday, TiVo and BlackBerry-maker RIM unveiled a free TiVo app in that will let people control their TiVos from the BlackBerry smartphone.
The app will let TiVo owners see a guide of what’s …
Originally posted at The Download Blog
Travelers don’t always get to do their homework about restaurants and nightlife before they leave, and you don’t want to be stuck relying on the advice of someone who winds up sharing different tastes than you.
(Credit: WorldMate)That’s the theory, anyway, behind WorldMate’s latest update …
Originally posted at The Download Blog
Updated 5:45 p.m. PDT with more details about e-mail push.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)Some of you who have been restlessly awaiting the arrival of Google’s official Gmail push solution for mobile phones can relax now. On Tuesday, Google expanded the over-the-air syncing capabilities in …
Originally posted at iPhone Atlas
(Credit: gDial Pro)Not long ago, my colleague Rafe Needleman ranked a handful of native Google Voice applications for mobile phones, declaring Google’s own Google Voice app for Android phones the winner. No big surprise there, as Google owns both the voice service and the mobile operating system, and …
Originally posted at The Download Blog
Location-based social network Brightkite announced its first native BlackBerry application on Thursday. It was created by a third-party developer using the company’s application programming interface. Brightkite already offers native applications to iPhone and Android users.
Dubbed myKite, the BlackBerry app, which was created by developer Chris Hallgren, locates the …
Originally posted at Webware
These days, Mozilla’s Fennec and the Skyfire browser have been stealing all the thunder in the mobile browsing space. On Wednesday morning (that’s Tuesday night for us in San Francisco), Opera yanked some of it back with the release of Opera Mini 5 beta for Java phones.
Introducing a graphically enriched layout topside and new features below decks, the new Opera Mini beta browser is snappier, more attractive, and more advanced than last year’s predecessor, Opera Mini 4.2. Mini 5 beta brings over several features from Opera’s desktop browser (Opera 10 for Windows | Mac.) Tabbed browsing is among them, as is a password manager. Each page opens with Speed Dial, a grid of nine thumbnail images and Opera Desktop mainstay, that you assign to favorite Web sites and can select among to quickly launch a Web page. The Speed Dial view replaces Opera Mini’s previous landing page, a tangle of links capped with a search box and URL field. These thumbnail images make the landing page more meaningful, both in giving users a visual they can instantly recognize, and creating an easier target for users to accurately hit on touchscreen phones than a scrawny little link.
While the URL field and search bars haven’t joined together in this beta as they have in other mobile browsers and in most desktop browsers out there, Opera has at least consolidated the two onto a single line. To address another long-overdue fix, Opera now lets you type directly into a text field. In previous versions, clicking a field opened up a blank page, where you were prompted to start typing before you could return to the main interface.
Opera Mini gets into Opera Desktop's Speed Dial start screen.
(Credit: Opera Software)
Opera Mini’s navigation menu received another overhaul in Mini 5 beta. Opera moved it up to the top and made it completely icon-based. Press downward (on a D-pad for a keypad phone) to engage more items, like bookmarks, history, settings, and the Find in Page search tool, a new one for Opera Mini. Find in Page has previously been available in Opera Mini; it’s nice to see it return.
The password manager that’s new to Opera Mini works as expected, producing a dialog box the first time you log into a site asking if you’d like it to remember your credentials. You can turn this off in the Privacy portion of the Settings submenu.
Many additional features carry over from previous Opera Mini versions, including options to view the page as you would from the desktop versus a mobile view. There are also the usual shortcut keys and support for landscape mode on most phones (not on BlackBerrys, unfortunately, an ongoing omission). There are also additional options that pop up in response to long presses on the ’select’ key or on the touchscreen, like for selecting and copying text, opening the image, and now, for opening content in a new tab.
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Originally posted at The Download Blog
(Credit: F)On Friday, Mozilla released Fennec Alpha 3 for Windows Mobile, the latest in Mozilla’s effort to put its Firefox browser on a mobile phone. As with Fennec 1.0 beta 3 for the Maemo platform found on some Nokia Internet Tablets, Fennec for Windows Mobile makes changes …
Originally posted at The Download Blog