Written by Brett on Wednesday, August 26, 2009

RIM Two-For: Webkit for Blackberry And No More Iris On Windows Mobile


RIM_TorchMobile

I will admit two things up front, I am not a Blackberry fan at all, and I am a huge fan of the work the developers at Touch Mobile have been doing with their Iris web browser. The web browser that RIM has been including in their Blackberry devices is absolutely horrible.  I actually prefer Pocket Internet Explorer over the Blackberry browser, which says a lot about just how bad the Blackberry browser is.

Luckily, RIM must have finally figured out that they fail at making a decent web browser, so they just acquired Torch Mobile, the creators of the Iris web browser.  Iris is based on Webkit, which is the same magic behind a lot of popular web browsers including the ones on the iPhone and Palm Pre.

Iris_GReader_SS

Iris was one of the first, if not the first, Webkit web browsers that was available on Windows Mobile.  I used it in the early alpha stages because I had switched to Google Reader for all of my RSS feeds a while back.  Iris was able to duplicate the iPhone version of Google Reader fairly well, so it was my go to web browser for catching up with tech news.  Of course, it was definitely not a final product because it would frequently lock up when dealing with heavy JavaScript pages.  With each new version, Iris was getting more and more stable.  This gave me hope that if I had to go back to Windows Mobile for my main device, that I could still get a similar, though slower, web experience as the iPhone.

But, now that hope is crushed.  I do not see anything that officially says they will no longer offer their Windows Mobile version of Iris, but considering their downloads page now gives a nice “403 Forbidden” page.  So, it looks like I will be in search for another browser for Google Reader when I switch back to Windows Mobile…

Do any other Google Reader users use the iPhone version on their Windows Mobile device?  What is your favorite browser to use with Google Reader?

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Related posts:

  1. Iris Browser update to 1.1.9
  2. Iris Mobile Browser, Beta 2!
  3. New Iris Mobile Browser: because you can never have too many mobile browsers!
  4. Free For All: Torch Mobile’s Iris Browser
  5. BlackBerry Outage Rebates and a Windows Mobile Blackberry

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chris10230
Aug 26, 2009

Yo i gave on browsers for reading google reader since i found this

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=516168

Maybe you like it. Its slowly coming along…


Evoce
Aug 26, 2009

I’m using Opera Mobile 9.5 and it is doing a good job regarding the IPhone-Google-Reader!

p.s.: I just tried the Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta which is unable to render Google Reader in the Iphone-style (which is so sad since its turbo-mode is seriously utterly fast!)


Brett
Aug 26, 2009

@chris10230 That definitely looks promising. I need to dig into the Google Reader API to see what I can do with it on the Pre.

@Evoce Opera Mobile 9.5 was always just a bit off for me, which is why I preferred Iris. I will try it out again since Google has changed their iPhone page a bit.

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