Yesterday, Opera Software released an official Opera Mobile build for the Nokia N9 and N950 Harmattan phones.  It's available from the Nokia Store or as a deb package download from Opera. Compared with the 3rd party modified version of Opera Mobile 11 for MeeGo that's been available for sometime, this one offers the following improvements:

• Upgrade to Opera Mobile 11.5
• Auto-rotation support (in all four orientations)
• Buttons near the bottom edge of the screen behave properly
• The Internet connection dialog will be opened if you attempt to browse the web while not connected to the Internet

This is an Opera Labs Beta release. Known issues with this release are:

• This build (like the previous Opera Mobile 11 MeeGo ARM developer preview) is not optimised to conserve power — if you load a webpage with animations and leave Opera running, your battery will continue to drain, even when Opera Mobile is running in the background and/or the screen is turned off
• The system on-screen keyboard is not supported
• Adobe Flash and other plugins are not supported
• HTML5 video is not supported
• Haptic feedback/vibration is not supported

Unfortunately I no longer have an N9 so I can't give my first hand impressions of the new release. The screenshot above is of the older unofficial Opera Mobile 11 build running on an N9. Hopefully some N9 or N950 owners will chime in with comments detailing their experiences running Opera Mobile 11.5

Source DEV.OPERA

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If you're going to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week it's likely that you want to take in some of the many parties.  To make sure don't miss any of them, bookmark mob.is.it/m/4 in your phone browser. It's a cross-device mobile webapp that lists loads of MWC parties with all the important details like time and place and a link to the party host's information and sign up page.  There's an overview map of Barcelona showing  all the parties and detailed maps for each one. If your browser supports it, the maps are scrollable, zoomable and location aware so that you can see where you are in relation to the event.

The MWC parties webapp was created by mob.is.it, a three month old startup, whose product is an online tool for creating mobile websites that are fully optimized for all mobile phones and tablets.

According to CEO and founder Silvio Porcellana, "we «ate our own dogfood» and created the parties app using exclusively our own mobile website builder. I am very happy with the results, especially because now everybody that uses our mobile website creator will have access to the features and tools that allowed us to build the app”.

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Update 22-Feb-2012: Nokia has released an update to the Social app that fixes the Sharing bug described below. A hard reset is no longer needed as updating Social restores the abilitity to share images from the Gallery to Twitter and Facebook.  To install the update eithr run Software Update on the phone or use Nokia Suite's Phone Update feature.

Updating my Nokia N8 to Belle went pretty smoothly.   I didn't encounter the any of the email sync  or unresponsive UI issues that some users are reporting. However I was hit the "Feature Not Available" Sharing Bug. The bug appears when you open an image or video in the Gallery and tap the Share icon. That's supposed to pop up a menu (image, right) that allows you to send the picture or clip to your Twitter timeline or Facebook wall. But when I tapped it I got a delightful "Feature not supported" error (image left_.

The sharing bug is mentioned in an All About Symbian's post listing potential issues that Belle updaters might encounter together with fixes and workarounds for some of them. According to that post, the bug only occurs if you have updated to the 1.4 or 1.5 version of the Nokia Social client. This seems to be the case. I did update Social from the Nokia Store immediately after installing Belle and I had the bug. My friend Lenny @THE_TRUTH34 at Nokia Innovation hasn't updated Social and his sharing works fine.  The Social 1.5 update seems to have disapeared from the Store, further evidence that something wasn't right with it.

There's a thread on the Nokia Support Discussions forum where several people have reported the error. A Nokia employee has posted "We are currently working on a fix. The fix will be included in the next software version."Another poster claimed that uninstalling Social 1.5 and installing Social 1.3 fixed the problem for him.

The bug annoyed me so I decided to find a fix. Here are the things I tried, none of which helped.

1. A Soft Reset (hold down power button until phone vibrates 3 times) - this had no effect.
2. Uninstalled Social 1.5 and the Social Installer app - didn't help either
3. Tried to find a copy of Social 1.3. I Searched the Nokia Store, ran Software Update on the phone, ran the Nokia Suite Updater and did a web search for the Social 1.3 client download, but was unable to find a copy anywhere
4. I next tried reinstalling Belle using Nokia Suite. That gave me Social 1.3 but the "Feature not supported" error was still there

Finally, I did a hard reset (Settings > Phone > Phone management > factory settings) and it worked! I now have Social 1.3 and a working Share icon in the Gallery.

If you decide to hard reset your phone please remember that doing so will delete every file, contact, song, app and customization on your phone,  including everything on E:Mass memory.  To avoid nasty surprises, Be sure to backup your phone to a physical memory card or using Nokia Suite and then mount the E: drive in mass storage mode and file copy its contents to your PC.

Unless you can find a copy of Social 1.3 somewhere or wait for Nokia's promised fix, the only solution to the Galley sharing issue seems to be a hard reset.

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Coolendar is a deceptively simple looking cloud based calendar and to-do list that's very easy and intitive to use. You add entries (Coolendar calls them "Plans") by typing into a single free form field in Coolendar's iPhone or Android native apps or their Webapp.

Coolendar's natural language query processor looks for date or time related cues in entries like "Move the car tomorrow" or "Friday 9AM planning meeting" and makes them calendar entries. Items without dates or times are treated as to-do's.

You can flag entries as Important and mark them as Done. A filter drop down lets you view only entries for Today, Tommorow, This Week or just ones flagged as Important or Done.

Coolendar is well connected. It uses your Google account for authentication and login, but the Coolendar Calendar is independent and is not stored in Google Calendar. If you wish you can sync Coolendar with Google Calendar, Apple ICal or Microsoft Outlook. You can create events using email or Google Chat by sending  them to a Coolendar account . Coolendar can notify you of impeding events by email or Google Talk. Coolendar's email notifications contain handy links that let you mark the event as complete or delete and reschedule it.

Although it's not mentioned on Coolendar's site, the web app is very mobile aware, the layout and logic adapt to work perfectly in the Android, Symbian and Opera Mobile browsers. It's even functional, if a bit clunky (too large a font and lots of server round trips) in Opera Mini. I suspect it will work in just about any browser that has at least minimal JavaScript support.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Mail-IM-Talk-PIM/Productivity and PIM
Ratings: Content Usability
Mobile Link: coolendar.com

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This week is Social Media Week, a semi-annual (February and September) event for anyone interested in social media. So what is social media? Definitions vary, but to me it's any form of online collaboration and interaction including social networks, blogs, forums, wikis, microblogs, media sharing, online game worlds and much more.

The event is made up of over 1000 presentations, panels, brainstorming sessions, games and parties which are held during the same week in multiple cites around the world. The particular cities vary from year to year. This time around they are Hamburg, Hong Kong, London, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo, Toronto and Washington DC.

Most Social Media Week events are free to attend, thanks to corporate sponsorship by Nokia, Oglivy & Mather, Constant Contact, The Guardian, The Next Web, Financial Times and Livestream.

As you'd expect from an event focused on online interaction, Social Media Week has a website, plus a mobile webapp and native apps for Windows Phone, Symbian, Android and iOS.

Being a mobile web guy, I checked out the mobile webapp first. It was created by Mobile Perspectives LLC and can be found at m.socialmediaweek.org. Its main feature is an interactive event schedule for all 12 Social Media Week Feb. 2012 cites.

The event schedules are really nicely done. There's a separate schedule page for each city. The page has tabs across the top to select the day of the week, with the day's events listed below, chronologically down the page. Clicking an event leads to a page with details about the event including description, presenter bios, a map of the venue, and best of all, a Register button.

Most Social Media Week events are free but you do need to register for each one individually. That sounds like a chore but it's really easy with this webapp. Once you log in all you need to do to register for an event is to tap the Register button on the event page. That makes it really easy to register for events on the fly as your schedule evolves. I wish all mobile event apps were as well designed and easy to use as this one. The webapp, at least the events schedule part, adapts to work in just about any mobile browser from Safari to Opera Mini to most feature phone browsers.

If your are attending Social Media Week bookmark m.socialmediaweek.org on you phone now to keep you in the loop about what's happening now in your city and around the world.

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Nokia Belle comes with a new 7.4 version  of the Webkit based Nokia browser. Here's a run down of what I've been able to find that's new and improved in latest browser.

Geolocation support. Sites can now use a Web standards compliant Javascript API to request the user's location. When a site makes a location request the browser prompts the user if they wish to allow or deny the request (image above, left). This feature works with many existing sites including local search engine Local.com and restaurant finders from fonefood, Sonic Drive In and Open Table. It also works with "Nearby" feature in Google+ and with Facebook Check In at touch.facebook.com.

<video> Support The browser now supports the HTML5 video tag using the H.264/MPEG-4 format. There's no WebM or Ogg Theora support.

User Interface changes: In Belle (image above, right) there is a new full width action menu at the bottom of the screen with buttons for forward, back, bookmarks, windows and menu. Although the new menu does take up some precious screen real estate, I like having one click access to the Windows menu and Bookmarks.

The new menu bar also fixes a couple of problems with Anna's semi-transparent back and menu buttons (image above, left). The Anna browser's buttons had a tendency to intercept taps intended for links and buttons at the bottom of the page itself. And because the white portion of the buttons wasn't transparent they often covered up text. The new action menu is below and independent of the actual page so it doesn't interfere with it at all.

Main Menu changes: The main browser menu (image above, right) now has new buttons to display your most visited sites and to go to the RSS feed list.

Text Copy: The Nokia browser finally lets you copy text from a web page and paste it into a Web form or to another app. To copy text, do a long press on the start of the text you want to copy and drag to the end. I found this feature a bit hard to use compared with the way copying works in the Android, iOS and Opera browsers . In the Nokia browser you have to select text in a single move. As soon as you lift your finger a dialog appears asking if you want copy or do a web search using the selected text.  Other browsers give you grab handles that let you resize the selection before copying which makes it easier to get precisely the text you want.

There are also some new gestures

• Double tap at botton of screen - go to page bottom.
• Double tap at top of screen  - go to page top.
• Long pressing a link now shows a context menu that lets you open the link in a new window or copy the URL to the clipboard.

More HTML5 Support Thanks to the addition of geolocation and <video> support, the Belle browser scores 157 on HTML5test.com (image above, right). While this is still near the bottom of the back among modern smartphone browsers, it's a signifigant improvement over the Anna Browser's 104 score.

To sum it up, I'm pleased with the new browser, the UI changes are all positive and the addition of badly needed Geolocation support is an obvious win. Page loading and rendering speeds got a huge boost with the Anna browser and seem about the same in the latest version.  There is absolutely no reason not to upgrade to Belle, the browser improvements are solid and are just a small piece of the many positive changes Belle brings to legacy Nokia (aka Symbian) smartphones.

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Belle, the latest OS upgrade for what used to be called Symbian phones, was released yesterday in most markets for the C6-01, C7, E6, E7, N8, X7 and Oro. Update: Belle for the Nokia 500 was released Feb 15.)  I was pleasantly surprised  to see that updates for US phones were available on the first day of the rollout. This is a welcome change from the Anna release which came to North America months after it was available in most countries.

As of today it looks like Belle is available in most of the world for most devices and product codes. Notable exceptions include Canada, Australia and Israel where Belle isn't available for any variant yet. Nokia has a Web page where you can check availability by country and product code.

The Belle update can't be installed directly to the phone over the air. A PC is required.  Hopefully this will change for the millions on mobile users without a PC.  I run Ubuntu Linux on my PC so I had to fire up my dusty old Windows PC to get it. I'd always used the lean and mean Nokia Software Updater (NSU) for phone updates but when I fired it up I got a message saying "You must use Nokia Suite 3.3 or later to update your N8." So I launched Nokia Suite which seemed to run better than I remember and did the update in about 30 minutes unattended.

Here are my initial impressions.

Heed the warning to backup your phone! The Belle update didn't preserve very much of my existing data. I lost every app that I had installed, including ones installed on the E: drive. I also lost all my Notes. At least photos, contacts, saved text messages and browser bookmarks survived the upgrade.

Belle looks and feels a little like Android with a redesigned status/notification bar at the top of the screen (image above, left). Icons appear in the bar to notify you of new texts, missed calls and updates for preinstalled apps. Just like with Android you can drag the bar down to reveal a "drawer" with widgets that let you act on alerts. There are also widgets that let you adjust Bluetooth, WiFi and USB settings (image above, right) as well as handy buttons for toggling Mobile Data, WiFi, Bluetooth and the Silent profile. I'm rather disappointed that there is no email notification icon for the status bar.  As before, the only notification of new incoming email is an alert tone. As far as I know there isn't any way for third party apps like Twitter clients to add notifications to the status bar either.

Better Performance. Belle is even snappier than Anna, which itself was an improvement on PR 1.2. For example:

• Swiping between home screens is smooth and seems instantaneous.
• That annoying minute long hang after installing or uninstalling an app is gone.
• The Swype keyboard is a little less laggy, although it could stand some more improvident.
• There's improved memory management that's supposed to reduce the frequency of out of memory errors.

Lots of usability enhancements.

• The Nokia keyboard has larger, better spaced keys.
• The browser finally supports copying text from a page (image above, left).
• Up to six home screens are supported.
• Widgets are no longer limited to taking up the full width of the screen and come in many sizes.
• Application shortcuts can now be added one by one instead of in groups of four.  They can now be added directly from the main application list (image above right) as well as by long pressing on a  home screen (image below, left).
• Widgets can be dragged between homescreens
• The new Email and Social widgets (image below, right) are scrollable and much larger, allowing them to show more and longer summaries of Emails, Tweets and status updates.

There's a lot more that's new in Belle including new Camera and Browser user interfaces. All About Symbian, as usual, has a very comprehensive piece on Belle that includes a full change log.

There are supposed to be some browser performance improvements as well. I'm planning to write a post covering the browser in depth, including benchmarks and site compatibility testing.

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Found on the Mobile Web is a regular WAP Review feature listing newly added and updated sites on the YesWAP.com mobile portal and WapReview mobile site directory. With these latest additions the directory and portal now list 2361 mobile sites.

Tech/Internet/Web Design & Development

Move the Web Forward movethewebforward.org A "Responsive Web Design" promoting web developer community involvement in open standards. Links to web design and development resources and places where you can contribute to creating and promoting open standards.
Content:  Usability:

Search/Local

Nokia Places m.nokia.me/p?nord Local search engine powered by Nokia Maps. Results include address, a small map and click to call phone numbers
Content:  Usability:

Tech/Tech News Sites and Blogs

AfriGadget afrigadget.com Bamboo laptop cases, generating biogas from cow manure; boats, airplanes and soccer balls made from recycled materials. These are just a few of the hundreds of the amazing creations found in Afrigadget, a blog celebrating the ingenuity of African inventors and tinkers.
Content:  Usability:

Tech/Mobile/MobileTech

jQuery Mobile Gallery www.jqmgallery.com A gallery and directory of mobile sites and apps built with JQuery Mobile.
Content:  Usability:

Tech/Mobile/OS - Brand Specific/WebOS/Palm OS

webOS | Getting started www.hpwebos.com/us/products/software/webos/gettingstarted... It's probably a little late to post this, but I just discovered these mobile friendly Getting Started video tutorials and tips for new webOS users from HP. The well made videos do a great job of demonstrating the largely unrealized potential of WebOS.
Content:  Usability:

Business/News

MarketingProfs m.marketingprofs.com Tips, advice, and news for marketing professionals from a team of PROFessors and PROFessionals. Some content is behind a paywall but the majority of articles are free.

There's currently a bug in the mobile template that causes every other headline on the front page to link to the desktop version of the article rather than the mobile one to the consternation of users with a slow connection or metered data plans.
Content:  Usability:

Search/Maps and Directions

Nokia Maps m.maps.nokia.com Nokia Maps beta mobile webapp for Android and iOS is location aware, and supports paning and zooming.
Content:  Usability:

Entertainment and Leisure/Life Style/Women's Interest

Real Beauty m.realbeauty.com Mobile edition of Hearst Publishing's online magazine, Real Beauty. Features hair, makeup, skincare, and fitness tips. The site's mobile template design is by Crisp Wireless
Content:  Usability:

Entertainment and Leisure/Games

Braineez braineez.mobie.in Braineez lets you win virtual trophies, shields, cups, medals, badges etc. by participating in competitions like quizzes or an essay writing contest.
Content:  Usability:

Shopping/Stores

AGRICH agrich.mobi An illustrated online mobile seed catalog . Shop for seeds and plants. AGRICH sells vegetable, herb and flower seeds and plants, trees and shrubs in retail and wholesale quantities. Pay with PayPal or set up a wholesale account. US based company ships seeds worldwide.
Content:  Usability:

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Last week I did a post explaining how to modify Opera Mini's jad file to hide the unneeded touch keypad that displays at the bottom of the screen on some touchscreen phones. The post included a link to the modified Opera Mini. I received a request asking for a copy of the latest signed Java version of UC Browser modified to hide the keypad.

The process for modifying the UC Browser or any other Java app is exactly the same as what was described in the original post:

1.Download the app's jad file to a PC. You can get UC Browser jad files (signed or unsigned ) at www.ucweb.com/English/UCbrowser/platform.html?platform=java

2. Open the downloaded mini.jad with a text editor or Windows Wordpad

3. Scroll to the bottom of the file and paste in the following lines:

MIDlet-Touch-Support: True
UseNativeTextButtons: hide
ReverseSoftkeys: hide
UseNativeCommands: hide

4. Upload the file to Dropbox.com or another file sharing service that is easy to use in your phone browser. Click here to get a free 2GB Dropbox account (by using this referral link I get an extra 250 MB of storage in my Dropbox which I thank you for).

5. Visit Dropbox with your phone browser and click the modified mini.jad link to download it to your phone.

I posted the modified UC Browser jad at:
dl.dropbox.com/u/4637247/UCBrowser_V8.0.3.107_Java_pf70(Build11112416).jad
Short link: is.gd/uc8touch. To install it, go to is.gd/uc8touch with your phone browser.

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Originally published in 2009, this post is updated regularly with the latest workarounds for viewing the desktop versions of mobile sites in mobile browsers.

Last update 30-Jan-2012: Added Gmail and Google Reader workarounds. Updated Yahoo Mail, Facebook, MySpace and Orkut workarounds. Removed broken workarounds for CNN, MSN and Friendster.  Removed Newsweek because it no longer has a mobile site so no workaround is needed.

One of the biggest frustrations of using the web with mobile browsers is web sites that force them to use dumbed down mobile versions.  I have nothing against mobile sites, obviously. I build them and I write about them here at Wap Review.  It's not redirecting mobile browsers to the mobile versions of sites that bothers me. The problem  is with mobile sites that lack essential features or content found in the equivalent full web versions and don't offer users an easy way to view the full version. As I've been preaching for years, every mobile site needs to include a Full Version link.

Fortunately many mobile sites now include a link to the full version.  For sites that don't it's possible to force the full-web versions of some sites in mobile browsers by using a special URL.

Here's a list of websites where getting to the full version with mobile browsers is harder than it should be along with a workaround. Note that the the ful version may not work well or at all in your mobile browser.  But if there's a feature or content you like that's missing from the mobile site, it's worth trying the full version.

Facebook: Use facebook.com/home.php or www.facebook.com/home.php?m2w to load the full version in Opera Mini and most other mobile browsers.

Orkut: Has  a link to the full version at the bottom of most mobile pages.  Or you can go directly to it by using the URL: www.orkut.com/Home.

MySpace: In the iPhone and Android browsers there's a Full Site link on the MySpace Settings page.  It's missing in Opera Mini and many other mobile browsers. No problem, just use www.myspace.com/?ucm=true  to get to the full version in any browser.

The Yahoo homepage: use yahoo.com/?m=1 to open the desktop version

Yahoo Mail is a special case. us.mc1137.mail.yahoo.com/mc/welcome?ymv=0 loads the full version of  Yahoo Mail but only if you haven't upgraded to the "New" version of Yahoo Mail.  Switching to the new mail  seems to set a flag that  forces the mobile version of mail in nost mobile browsers.  You must switch back to Classic Yahoo mail in order to restore mobile access.  There doesn't seem to be anyway to switch back using a mobile browser, you have to find a PC to do it.

1. Go into Yahoo  Mail with a PC browser. Click the "Mail Classic" link at the top of the page and switch to Classic Mail.
2. Launch your mobile browser and go to us.mc1137.mail.yahoo.com/mc/welcome?ymv=0 and you should be in Mail Classic.
3. The key thing is that you must switch your account to use Mail Classic. You need to use a PC browser to make that switch. There doesn't seem to be any way to use the "New" Yahoo Mail on your PC and the Classic version on your phone.

More full version direct links:

Google News: news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn
Gmail: mail.google.com/mail/h/
Google Reader: www.google.com/reader/view/
ESPN: espn.go.com
Wall Street Journal: online.wsj.com/home-page

Hall of Shame: There are a few sites that stubbornly refuse to let Opera Mini users view their full web version.

• Microsoft:  Is the worst offender.  Just about all Microsoft sites including Hotmail, MSN and Skydrive force mobile users to a limited mobile version with no known workaround.
  
• Picassaweb and iGoogle: These two sites are exceptions to  Google's generally good job of providing links to the "Classic"  non-mobile versions.

If you find workarounds for other sites that are blocking mobile users from their full-web versions please leave a comment and I'll add your discoveries to this post.

For problem sites try changing your browser's user agent

Web sites are able to tell that you are using a mobile browser by reading the HTTP User-Agent header that browsers send.  Some mobile browsers let you change the User-Agent to spoof the site into thinking your are using a desktop browser. Here are the browsers that I know about that allow changing the User Agent and how to do it.

Android browser: On most Android phones you can enable a hidden UAString menu item by typing about:debug in the URL bar and pressing Enter.  Nothing will seem to change but if you go to Settings and scroll all the way to the bottom you'll see the UASting option. It lets you choose between an Android, Desktop, iPhone or iPad User-Agent

Opera Mobile 11.50 on Symbian and Android: A User Agent option in the Advanced Settings menu lets you choose between mobile and desktop versions.

UC Browser: Java and Symbian 8.0 versions have User Agent option in the Settings (Java) or Settings > Preferences > Network (Symbian) menu.

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