At first glance the browser is a bit of a mess: its Android Market listing is subliterate, and its interface—the tabs, specifically—look kind of assy on the Droid's higher-resolution screen. Beyond the glitches, though, it's a capable browser, with gesture support, RSS integration and yes, multitouch.

Dolphin's multitouch implementation works on a number of handsets aside from the Droid, from the Hero, which supports multitouch out of the box, to Cyanogen-modded G1s and MyTouch 3Gs, which don't. It works much better on faster hardware though: where it's a bit laggy on a stock Hero, it's surprisingly smooth on Motorola's speedier terminator phone. At any rate, it's free, and available now in the Market, so, go. [Dolphin via Engadget Mobile]

BlackBerry just put out a call for WebKit developers, for a very specific reason:

Utilizing their knowledge in C++ programming, the successful candidate will be working in a fast-paced, dynamic development environment to develop a WebKit-based browser for the BlackBerry Platform.

Ok! The only question now is, when? Normally the initial hiring of a core developer could be taken to mean that the project is embryonic, and the final product still months away, but keep in mind: In Torch Mobile's Iris, RIM bought an entire, complete browser. In other words, this may just be an optimization project, not a full-on browser development, so decent browsing on BlackBerry could be closer than we thought. [CareerBeacon via Engadget]

Peter-Paul Koch at Quirksmode devised a battery of rendering tests to see how different WebKit browsers measure up, and ran everything from desktop Safari 4 to the Pre's browser to S60V5 through a CSS and Javascript compatibility course. Evidently, some WebKit browsers are barely WebKit browsers at all—especially on mobile. Some surprises? Android browsers aren't so hot, nor is the Pre's. And Nokia, which has had WebKit browsers forever, can't seem to make a good one.

There are really two culprits here: older versions of WebKit, which cripple browsers like S60v3's; and developers' need to pare their software down to make it run smoothly on mobile devices. In other words, some of these browsers have been stripped of HTML, CSS and Javascript rendering capabilities on purpose.

What'd be really interesting is if the above chart reflected speed and performance measurements too, because as (apparently) bad as the Android G1's browser is at rendering obscure CSS elements, actually using it is a far sight more enjoyable than struggling with the unconscionably slow Iris on Windows Mobile. Full methodology and test list at [Quirksmode via IntoMobile]

The 7-inch (800x480) tablet runs Ubuntu and a browser based upon WebKit. The light footprint software allows its 667MHz ARM processor with 128MB of RAM (ick!), 1GB of RAM storage to browse the internet, Facebook and Twitter. (Given that we're talking Ubuntu, there's a world of other software you could run, too...if you can find the space))

But where the software/hardware shines is a one-button text-to-speech updates on social networking sites. Just hold the button and say things like "Today, I stepped in a pile of dog crap. The crap flicked off my shoe into my mouth. Then, out of nowhere, the girl I've had a crush on since first grade decided to kiss me for the first time. It happens that's she was not only disgusted but also deathly allergic to canine feces. I no longer have a date to the prom, and now my dad is making me go hunting instead. FML." Then they'll show up on Facebook or Twitter. You can also speak URLs rather than typing them in.

The SQ7 weighs slightly more than a pound and runs for a modest 5 hours per charge. But at just $250 this October, it's lower risk than it could be. We'll try to get our hands on one to test it out. You can also watch a demo here. [AdelaVoice via besttabletreview via ubergizmo]

They Call It "Open" For a Reason
One of the more excellent aspects of Snow Leopard, actually, is its full-scale deployment of OpenCL 1.0—Open Computing Language—a framework that allows programmers to more easily utilize the full power of mixes of different kinds of processors like GPUs and multi-core CPUs. (Much of the excitement for that is in leveraging the GPU for non-graphical applications.)

OpenCL lives up to its name: It is a royalty-free open standard managed by the Khronos Group, and supported by AMD/ATI, Apple, ARM, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, among others. Interesting thing about this open industry standard is that it was developed and proposed by... Apple.

What Is a Standard?
By "standard," we're talking about a format, interface or programming framework that a bunch of companies or people or organizations agree is the way something's going to get done, whether it's how a movie is encoded or the way websites are programmed. Otherwise, nothing works. A video that plays on one computer won't play on another, web sites that work in one browser don't work in another, etc. With increased connectedness between different machines and different platforms, standards are increasingly vital to progress.

Standards can range from open (anybody can use them, for free) to open with conditions (anybody can use them as long they follow conditions X, Y and Z) to closed (you gotta have permission, and most likely, pay for it). Some companies view standards strictly as royalty machines; others don't make much money on them, instead using them to make sure developers do things the way they want them to. Apple falls into this latter category, by choice or possibly just by fate.

Kicking the Big Guy in the Shins
Of course, OpenCL isn't the only open standard that Apple's had a hand in creating or supporting that actually went industry-wide. When you're the little guy—as Apple was, and still is in computer OS marketshare, with under 10 percent—having a hand in larger industry standards is important. It keeps your platform and programming goals from getting steamrolled by, say, the de facto "standards" enforced by the bigger guy who grips 90 percent of the market.

If you succeed in creating a standard, you're making everybody else do things the way you want them done. If you're doubting how important standards are, look no further than the old Sony throwing a new one at the wall every week hoping it'll stick. Or Microsoft getting basically everybody but iTunes to use its PlaysForSure DRM a couple years ago. Or its alternative codecs and formats for basically every genuine industry standard out there. To be sure, there is money to be made in standards, but only if the standard is adopted—and royalties can be collected.

Web Standards: The Big Headache
The web has always been a sore spot in the standards debate. The web is a "universal OS," or whatever the cloud-crazy pundits call it, but what shapes your experience is your browser and in part, how compliant it is with the tools web developers use to build their products. Internet Exploder shit all over standards for years, and web programmers still want IE6 to die in a fiery eternal abyss.

Enter WebKit, an open source browser engine developed by Apple based off of the KHTML engine. It's so standards-compliant it tied with Opera's Presto engine to be the first to pass the Acid3 test. What's most striking about WebKit isn't the fact it powers Safari and Google Chrome on the desktop, but basically every full-fledged smartphone browser: iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Symbian and (probably) BlackBerry. So WebKit hasn't just driven web standards through its strict adherence to them, but it has essentially defined, for now, the way the "real internet" is viewed on mobile devices. All of the crazy cool web programming you see now made is made possible by standards-compliant browsers.

True, OpenCL and WebKit are open source—Apple's been clever about the way it uses open source, look no further than the guts of OS X—but Apple is hardly devoted to the whole "free and open" thing, even when it comes to web standards.

All the AV Codecs You Can Eat
The recent debate over video in the next web standards, known collectively as HTML5, shows that: Mozilla supports the open-source Ogg Theora video codec, but Apple says it's too crappy to become the web's default video standard—freeing everyone from the tyranny of Adobe's Flash. Apple says Ogg's quality and hardware acceleration support don't match up to the Apple-supported MPEG-4 standardized H.264 codec, which is tied up by license issues that keep it from being freely distributed and open. (Google is playing it up the middle for the moment: While it has doubts about the performance of Ogg Theora, Chrome has built-in support for it and H.264.)

Apple has actually always been a booster of MPEG's H.264 codec, which is the default video format supported by the iPhone—part of the reason YouTube re-encoded all of its videos, actually—and gets hardware acceleration in QuickTime X with Snow Leopard. H.264 is basically becoming the video codec (it's in Blu-ray, people use it for streaming, etc.).

Why would Apple care? It means Microsoft's WMV didn't become the leading standard.

A sorta similar story with AAC, another MPEG standard. It's actually the successor to MP3, with better compression quality—and no royalties—but Apple had the largest role in making it mainstream by making it their preferred audio format for the iPod and iTunes Store. (It saw some limited use in portables a little earlier, but it didn't become basically mandatory for audio players to support it until after the iPod.) Another bonus, besides AAC's superiority to MP3: Microsoft's WMA, though popular for a while, never took over.

FireWire I Mean iLINK I Mean IEEE 1394
Speaking of the early days of the iPod, we can't leave out FireWire, aka IEEE 1394. Like OpenCL, Apple did a lot of the initial development work (Sony, IBM and others did a lot of work on it as well), presented it to a larger standards body—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers—and it became the basis for a standard. They tried to charge a royalty for it at first, but that didn't work out. It's a successful standard in a lot of ways—I mean, it is still on a lot of stuff like hard drives and camcorders still—but USB has turned out to be more universal, despite being technically inferior. (At least until USB 3.0 comes out, hooray!)

Update: Oops, forgot Mini DisplayPort, Apple's shrunken take on DisplayPort—a royalty-free video interface standard from VESA that's also notably supported by Dell—which'll be part of the official DisplayPort 1.2 spec. Apple licenses it for no fee, unless you sue Apple for patent infringement, which is a liiiiittle dicey. (On the other hand, we don't see it going too far as industry standard, which is why we forgot about it.)

That's just a relatively quick overview of some of the standards Apple's had a hand in one way or another, but it should give you an idea about how important standards are, and how a company with a relatively small marketshare (at least, in certain markets) can use them wield a lot of influence over a much broader domain.

Shaping standards isn't always for royalty checks or dominance—Apple's position doesn't allow them to be particularly greedy when it comes to determining how you watch stuff or browse the internet broadly. They've actually made things better, at least so far. But, one glance at the iPhone app approval process should give anybody who thinks they're the most gracious tech company second thoughts about that.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about standards, things that are open other than your mom's legs or Sony Ultra Memory Stick XC Duo Quadro Micro Pro II to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Given that Torch Mobile only makes one piece of software (currently unavailable), that they say their main contribution to the aforementioned "enhancement" will be "utilizing [their] WebKit-based mobile browser expertise," and that the iPhone, Android and Symbian have made WebKit the de facto standard for decent mobile web browsing, it's not hard to guess what's going on here. Also interesting: This comes just a week after rumors that BlackBerrys would soon(ishly) support Flash and Silverlight out of the box.

Now that we know RIM is serious about WebKit, the only questions left start with "when?" You know, like when will BlackBerry OS ship with its first WebKit browser? And when will everyone else finally just give up on doing anything else? [Torch Mobile via BGR]

HandMarket App Store: Handmark's mobile client for their ample Windows Mobile app market has left beta, and by all counts, it was ready to: Navigation is easy, there are a fair number of free apps, and they've snagged some big names, like Skyfire and EA games. Waiting for Microsoft's official store is for chumps, I say.

Skyfire: Speaking of SkyFire (unnecessary abbreviation: "SkyFi"), they've updated their start page with new content. This may not sound like much, but anyone who's used the browser can attest to the start page's usefulness as a launch pad. Previously it featured Twitter, Facebook and others; now, there's search history, Gmail—awesome—and Facebook album previews. Free.

Terrestrica: A crowd-sourced geotagging/tourism app, Terrestrica just got a fair bit more useful with the addition of direct, location-tagged Picasa uploading and Twitter integration. The user-contributed map data is still a little slim, though.

Google Maps Layers: If you like your map overlays a little more, shall we say, filled out, Google Maps has just updated their excellent WinMo app with support for user layers, just like the desktop version has. It's had Latitude support, too, for a while now, which is more than can be said for, ahem, some other mobile platforms.

iDialer: I appreciate when my mobile apps have a sense of humor, and I can't help but think iDialer does: At first glance, it looks like an iPhone dialer ripoff—the kind of pathetic app that makes Windows Mobile users cringe, and iPhone fanboys feel warm and smug inside. But there's a minor detail that you shouldn't overlook: it's a seamless, easy to setup Google Voice client, too. Ha. It's donationware, so be generous.

SPB Radio: A tidy little radio app from a company that makes some of the more polished Windows Mobile apps out there today, SPB radio has a healthy directory (around 1,500 streams) of radio content and a slick, finger-friendly interface. The stations are free—it's a shame the app isn't. $10.

Windows Mobile 6.5 Emulator: It's a stretch for an app roundup, but everyone seems pretty curious about what Windows Mobile 6.5 is going to be like, so here you go: If you're not venturesome enough to install one of the many betas floating around to tubes onto your primary phone, have a go with Microsoft's free desktop emulator. You're in for a pleasant surprise, actually.

Office Communicator R2: Suits: Your preferred corporate communication app has been upgraded, and now you can log into your office's private branch exchange from anywhere, VPN-style. Neat, right! No? Just click next.

Bing: Microsoft has released a full, dedicated mobile app for its Bing search engine, which brings fuller phone integration, map searches and easier local listings compared to the regular mobile web interface. It's like all those Google search apps you've seen elsewhere, except decidedly Bingier.

Dorothy: WebKit has become the de facto mobile browser engine—it's the heart of the iPhone, Android and Symbian browsers—but Windows Mobile has been sadly neglected. Iris browser works, strictly speaking, but it's a little slow, and awkward to use (though development seems to have picked up as of late). Hopefully Dorothy, which is still in a closed private beta but looks fantastic, can fill the void.

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this month, give us a heads up or let us know in the comments. Have a good rest of your weekend, everybody!

(Previously)

Arrington's incorporated a separate company, called CrunchPad, and has apparently spent two-thirds of the last six months working on it with his 15-man team from Fusion Garage.

It's been iterated a bunch before, but worth saying again, that the Atom-powered touchscreen CrunchPad is strictly for internet consumption—it boots directly into the WebKit browser and there's no hard drive or keyboard, though you can plug in a keyboard if you want. It does support for Flash, so Arrington's claim that compared to netbooks, "most people will find it works as good as a netbook or better" for getting their internet on sounds pretty reasonable, given its 12-inch screen. Pointedly, it's not meant to compete with Apple's mythical tablet, whenever it graces the world.

I'd take the under $300 CrunchPad over a netbook any day, since it seems like it'll surpass them at the one thing they were supposedly designed to do—eat the internet. And it still blows my mind it took a tech blogger to actually make it happen. [Bits]

There simply isn't a better mobile browser than WebKit right now. It powers the internet in the iPhone, Android, Symbian S60 and Palm Pre, and destroyed all comers in our Battlemodo. It's fast, it's competent and most importantly from a development perspective, it's open source. Meaning Microsoft could adopt it for its mobile devices with (relatively) little shame (okay, maybe a lot of shame) and it's ready to go right now, meaning there's no wasting time building a new engine just to attempt to play catchup to a browser that handily delivers the best mobile internet experience right now across multiple platforms.

Mozilla's Fennec could become a contender to the throne, true, but it's still far from final. Opera and Skyfire are interesting and good, but they're both proprietary, meaning there's no chance in hell they'd ever be adopted by Microsoft or RIM, much less the entire industry, as the basis for their mobile browsers. Update: BTW, Ballmer himself mentioned they might look at WebKit.

You could rail against the idea of WebKit becoming a "monopoly," but you'd be foolish to do so: Web standards are important, and WebKit, which is again, open source, is dedicated to standards compliance and performance. A performance and compliance standard that web developers could count on in every single mobile device wouldn't be a bad thing—far from it. It would mean even more amazing web apps, since developers would know they'd run on any mobile device, no matter what "OS" they were running underneath—the web would be the real OS.

That day is coming. I just hoped I'd see it a little sooner.

It moves a lot faster between pages that don't require fresh data because it uses database storage on the iPhone and Android's built-in Google Gears implementation, which supposedly makes it work better on a slow connection besides giving it some offline powers. Search and loading emails from the main screen isn't necessarily quicker, but picking contacts and opening particular messages within a thread—yes, threaded conversations work just like real Gmail now—is definitely quicker. You can also get to other Google apps (like your calendar, which is improved now too) in a snap.

It feels more like an app with the sunburst style progress spinner anytime you need to load stuff, and a button for "load more messages" at the bottom that responds nearly instantly, rather than having to load a whole new web page. Search is no longer shoved at the bottom of the window, there's an actual button for it on top (which is great since the reason I fired up the Gmail site was for search). There's a "floaty bar" that follows you down as you scroll with functions like delete, archive and report spam. The new UI feels a bit more finger friendly, and it uses Gmail's newer color scheme, with a grayer blue and more subtle colors that makes it more readable, too.

If you don't like it, you can always go back to the old site, too. [Gmail Blog]

Google demonstrated a new Gmail mobile web app that leverages the HTML5 database and app cache features, which allow web apps to store certain types of data locally, much like Google Gears. The result is a super-slick app that retains a database of messages even when your cellphone lack any connectivity, and that'll allow regulars tasks—message composition, deletion, and organization—to be queued up for synchronization when the phone next has service.

Offline email in itself isn't a revelation, but the fact that this app—and other conceivable apps that could effectively leverage the same technology—could work on any phone with WebKit-based browser is fantastic. That includes, for now, the iPhone, any Android phone, the Pre and some S60 phones. Where complex web apps kind of sputtered in lieu of native applications on the iPhone, the potential reach of rich, pan-platform WebKit applications could be enough to spur some really exciting stuff. [iPhoneBuzz via Mobilecrunch]

The version you see above is for BlackBerry, though functionality should be almost identical between platforms. Like Skyfire of Opera Mini, Bolt performs a good deal of page optimization server-side, meaning that it's fast. In fact, compared to the Bold's stock browser, it's really fast. Rendering accuracy looks about as good as any other WebKit-based mobile browser (Safari, Chrome, S60 default browser) but appears significantly snappier than its competition.

Bolt is in a private beta for now, but you can request an invite here.

J2ME is nearly ubiquitous, barring the obvious iPhone/G1 exceptions. That means Bolt will run fine on your BlackBerry, S60 and Windows Mobile phones, among many others. [CrackBerry]

Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

CHART KEY: Number value is time for complete page load in seconds; page rendering is rated from "Fail" to "Excellent" for each; and the color (red, yellow, green) indicates overall performance taking into account both speed and rendering accuracy: Green = good overall, Red = fail overall.

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:
Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.

Ballmer not trashing open source? Or anything at all? In the span of several sentence? Whoooa. It sounds like something between a throwaway line and a more significant proclamation. In other words, don't expect Internet Explorer 9 to use WebKit, but it sounds like Ballmer's looking at open source at least a little bit differently than he used to. And hell, maybe one day we will see WebKit in Internet Explorer. [Cnet]