There’s been a huge amount of Windows Mobile Browser news over the past week, courtesy of the MWC. Also our friend Werner over at SmartPhoneMag has put up a full list of all the browser news, and his insights as to the current situation with Windows Mobile browsing. One of the  browsers, Iris from Torch mobile, is finally out of Beta and ready for public consumption, and it’s still free.

I have tried out Iris many a time through it’s development, and of course it didn’t last, install, try, uninstall you know the drill. Although, as with all mobile browsers, the rule of thumb is to deliver the closest thing to a desktop browsing experience on a mobile phone, as possible.

Market leaders in the Mobile browser world, Opera, have defined the feature set, paradigm, for what we expect from a WinMo browser, and all other browser developers, including Microsoft have been playing catch up for quite a while. As most WinMo users are using Opera mobile for a comparison platform for a browser, any software that comes close for free is going to be a viable option, in steps Iris…

Iris offers a good option for free, and some nice added features and UI features. iris is more customisable than ever before and fast, it renders quite well.

One of the things that has never endeared me to the Iris browser, is it’s lack of an intuitive user interface, but some of the things that torch have done with this commercial release of Iris, though spectacular, are dressing that’s probably not needed, but fun never the less.

Iris is incredibly similair in operation to Opera 9.5 beta, except for Google gears support, they both render device side, and therefore expect a rather large RAM deficit on your device.

It is though rather simple to set up, and intelligently laid out, you never have to go more than two menu links deep to get to/set the options you want to set, and it includes all of the most common options that Windows Mobile will support at this time.

There’s even a private browsing option, that allows you to not record your history, if you are looking at dubious NSFW or anywhere sites on your mobile device, although I can’t see how you would need that.

I have to say though, it’s working quite well for me, and there are some nifty UI tweaks that are sweet

Both the tabs and history options give you a nice animated, finger friendly way  of scrolling through the open tabs or your current browsing history, and the transitions from here back to actual web pages are cleverly animated as well.

I find this a wonderful and refreshing release, there are some really nice features, and some jiggly animated add ons, but as a browser, it beats Mobile Internet Explorer and that’s what most WinMo users are looking for relief from.

I’ve done a short Vid from Soti pocket Controller to try and demonstrate the animated transitions, and to show a couple of other features, and you’ll get an idea of the rendering speed as well.

One of the funniest things with this browser is the fact that it seems to think my tilt is an iPhone, and delivers me to the iPhone optimised version of JAMM, from my normal bookmark, something I’m sure they’ll work on.

I think Torch have done a great job with this release, making a mediocre Beta into a player in the WinMo world, and free is always a great incentive.

Check it out and download here

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