Top 5 user-installable browsers for your java mobile phone

Mobile Browser :

A mobile browser (also called a microbrowser or minibrowser) is a web browser designed for use on a mobile device such as a mobile phone or PDA. An efficient mobile browser should use minimum resources and bandwidth of wireless hand held devices.A mobile browser usually connects via GPRS ( General Packet Radio Service ). The main limitation of GPRS technology is its speed. In 2G systems they average 56-114 kb/s.

In-built Browser:

The browser that is in-built in your mobile phone has the following limitations.

• It is designed mainly for wap sites.
• It may not support CSS styling.
• Pages cannot be saved.
• You cannot bookmark & create shortcuts.
• No option for page zoom.
• Difficult User Interface
• Some pages may not render properly.

So if you want to browse using your mobile phone like you normally do in your desktop. Then user-installable mobile browsers comes handy here. I recommend you to install any of the  following  mobile browsers (for java phones) that are available free of cost.

Note: Symbian phones also support Java.

Top 5 Mobile Java Browsers:

1.Opera Mini by Opera Software

2.UCWEB by UCWEB Technology

3.TeaShark (No Company Info)

4.Bolt by Bitstream

5.JIG by jig.jp co.,ltd.

Opera Mini : (Highly recommended )

Opera Mini enables you to take your full web experience to your mobile phone. At present they have more than 20 million users and are clearly in the lead.

Features :

1. Sync with desktop Opera

2. Download and upload files (JSR-75 support needed)

3. Save pages

4. Speed dial

5. View in landscape mode

6. Custom search shortcuts

7. SSL support

8. Page Overview

9. Javascript support

10. And other standard features.

Opera Mini keeps an active connection between server and client to increase speed.Do you want to see how your website looks in OM ? Then click here

Download : http://www.opera.com/mini/download/

Tip : type about:config in your OM to access advanced settings.

Note : This blog is optimized for Opera Mini.

UCWEB: (Feature rich )

Current competitor to  Opera Mini with many useful features. UCWEB download function supports the big file download and the break points discontinuous transmission, which adopts the data compression technique to reduce the data traffic.

Features :

1. Built-in mailing function

2. Download manager

3. Push SMS

4. Clipboards

5. Traffic Stats

6. Custom user agent

7. Personalized Data Management

8. And other standard features.

But their User Interface is not that good comparing to OM.

Download : http://www.ucweb.com/English/download.shtml

Teashark: (Desktop like rendering)

Tea shark renders web pages the same way as desktop browsers. So your favorite web sites are same on your mobile phone and desktop.

Features :

1. 2 level zoom

2. Multi tabs

3. Bookmarks with color tagging

4. Click and search

5. Navigate Intuitively

6. Mouse Cursor

7. Phone no. recognition

8. And other standard features.

Teashark is a beta service and is not fully tested. Since each page is rendered as desktops do its speed is slower than OM and UCWEB

Download : http://www.teashark.com/download.html

Bolt: (Full PC style browsing)

A new browser written in Java ME from Bitstream the maker of ThunderHawk. The best feature of Bolt is the way it maintains the original appearance of pages. Since it is in Beta use any of these referral codes to download it.

• berryreview
• berrycool
• Crunch
• intomobile

Features :

1. Split screen browsing

2. Relatively light weight

3. Faster than its competitors

4. 1/3 battery power comparing to other browsers.

5. AJAX support

6. Phone no. recognition

7. And some other features.

For a browser in its beta stage, Bolt is pretty good and I expect the final version to be a little faster and more feature-rich.

Download : http://www.boltbrowser.com/download.html

JIG: (Customize your experience)

The jig browser, an Internet browser for mobile phones. Speedy and intuitive, with the jig browser it’s easy to access information on the go, whenever you want.

Update  : No support / development

Features :

1. Plugins

2. Support for flash,WMA,WLV

3. Rapid scrolling

4. Various view modes.

5. And some other features.

Download : Softpedia

Important :

Mobile browsers uses a transcoder server to translate HTML/CSS/JavaScript into a more compact format.To be able to do this translation, these server needs to have access to the unencrypted version of the Web page. Therefore no end-to-end encryption between the client and the remote Web server is possible.

So use it only if you trust. In this regard, OM supports SSL between handset and transcoder server so it is highly recommended.