Are there any better web browsers for mobile phones?

Question: I have My Portfolio set up at iGoogle and can see it fine on a PC. But when I go to iGoogle using my Blackberry it does not show up – everything else on the iGoogle home page I have does. How can I see My Portfolio? (I used to have it at my Excite homepage but they no longer offer that service of showing your personal portfolio.

Answer: The default web browser that comes with Blackberry mobile phones is just “ok”, but not great. It doesn’t do a very good job of showing complex web pages, and usually strips them down to a more mobile-friendly smaller screen size.

Opera has a web browser that’s completely free called Opera Mini, that runs quite a bit better on a wide variety of phones. It lets you view web pages in full view, and let’s you zoom in on the areas that you want to see.

Here’s the iGoogle page in full screen view:

Notice the rectangle on the screen? That’s the zoom viewfinder, and watch how it zooms into that area of the screen when I click the scroll button:

Question: I have My Portfolio set up at iGoogle and can see it fine on a PC. But when I go to iGoogle using my Blackberry it does not show up – everything else on the iGoogle home page I have does. How can I see My Portfolio? (I used to have it at my Excite homepage but they no longer offer that service of showing your personal portfolio.

Answer: The default web browser that comes with Blackberry mobile phones is just “ok”, but not great. It doesn’t do a very good job of showing complex web pages, and usually strips them down to a more mobile-friendly smaller screen size.

Opera has a web browser that’s completely free called Opera Mini, that runs quite a bit better on a wide variety of phones. It lets you view web pages in full view, and let’s you zoom in on the areas that you want to see.

Here’s the iGoogle page in full screen view:

Notice the rectangle on the screen? That’s the zoom viewfinder, and watch how it zooms into that area of the screen when I click the scroll button:

Once you’ve zoomed into an area of the screen, then you can use the scroll button to pan left, right, up and down to view the zoomed view of the entire page. Pretty cool if you ask me 🙂

One thing to know about Opera Mini that’s a little different than the blackberry browser is that you have to click the scrollbar in a text entry field in order to edit text in that field. Opera will take you to a different screen to enter the value in that field, and then you’ll press the scroll button again to submit the value and go back to the page you were viewing.

Give it a try – it does a much better job for web pages then the built-in Blackberry browser, and I was able to view my entire iGoogle page using Opera Mini.