On Tuesday, Mozilla released the latest version of Firefox 4 for Android and Maemo smartphones. Firefox 4 now includes support for Firefox Sync, which allows you to sync open tabs, history, bookmarks, passwords, and other data, between your computer and your smartphone. The new Firefox allows for tabbed browsing, add-on installation, and features a new, streamlined look. Mozilla says it will also automatically hide the browser controls when they aren’t in use, which should allow users to view more of the website you’re parked on. There’s also options to save PDFs, share pages, and customize the default search engine. Mozilla says that Firefox 4 is up to 3x faster than the stock Android browser. Firefox 4 for Android is available in the Market now, and the Maemo version can be downloaded here.

Read

Former Vice President of MeeGo Devices at Nokia Ari Jaaksi began a new role earlier this month with Hewlett-Packard, where he is now a Senior Vice President. Jaaksi’s LinkedIn profile states simply, “I run webOS and services @ HP.” The former Nokia exec left the company earlier this year after a 12-year tenure with the Finnish phone giant. Most recently, Jaaksi was VP in charge of MeeGo, Nokia’s next-generation Linux-based OS being developed through a partnership with Intel. Rumors that Jaaksi would be hired by HP first surfaced last month, when it was thought that he would join the company to oversee Palm devices. Instead, it looks as though Jaaksi’s role will focus on software and services.

[Via All About Phones]

Read

If for whatever reason you feel that the default browser loaded on your Android or Maemo device is not sufficient, you should know that you have options. Opera Mobile is available, the very capable Dolphin browser is available, and now — thanks to a recently released beta — Mozilla Firefox is available. The list of features include:

Pinch-to-zoom (Android), double-tap, or use the volume rocker (Nokia N900) to zoom in and out

Tabbed browsing in thumbnail view lets you easily see and open the site you want

Location-Aware Browsing gives you content and info relevant to your location

Find in Page in the Site Menu lets you quickly find text on the webpage

Share Page in the Site Menu lets you send content to email, Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader

Forget Password in the Site Menu tells a website you no longer trust to forget your private data

Add Search Engine in the Site Menu lets you quickly add a new search engine to your Awesome Screen

Context Menu lets you Open in New Tab and Share by long tapping and holding a link

Smart Tapping lets you tap on links, widgets and other Web content with accuracy

Password Manager lets you choose to remember site password to avoid typing

The beta will support the Nokia N900 and any Android device running OS version 2.0 or higher. Hit the read link to download Mozilla’s latest creation, and let us know what you think.

Read

No real surprise here, but at least it’s now official. Nokia confirmed on Thursday that it will no longer offer Symbian-based handsets its Nseries line-up after the N8 is released. In its place, Nokia will be looking to MeeGo, an open source mash-up of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin. This is a pretty smart move for Nokia’s flagship line, especially considering the horrible tongue lashing dealt to Symbian^3-powered N8 by Russian mobile guru Eldar Murtazin, no?

Read

Although none of its previous attempts at cracking the tablet market have been met with success, Rodman Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar piped up today and claimed that Nokia is once again going to try to break into the now-burgeoning market. So far there’s nothing in the way of evidence to support his claims, but we don’t think we need to look much further than the fact Nokia and Intel recently merged Maemo with Mobilin to create MeeGo to see that the chances of Nokia once again putting a tablet on store shelves are pretty good.

Read

Thanks to Mozilla we got our hands on a Nokia N900 for a few weeks and had the opportunity to give its new Firefox Mobile browser a thorough test drive. Firefox Mobile has a long development history that started in late 2008 when Mozilla announced its very early alpha browser first for the Maemo platform and then for the Windows Mobile platform. While the Windows Mobile version may have been abandoned, the Maemo version just came out of beta earlier this year and is still going strong. Despite its enthusiasm, Firefox Mobile is entering a very crowded mobile browser field that is dominated by Opera Mobile, Opera Mini and the built-in WebKit browsers found on the iPhone, Android, and WebOS handsets. With most smartphone platforms now rocking very capable browsers, how does Firefox Mobile stand up to the competition? Hit the jump to find out.

Firefox Mobile distinguishes itself from its competition with three different features that are designed to enhance the mobile browsing experience. These features include the Awesome bar, Extensions, and Weave Sync, and together these three features will form the crux of this review.

Awesome Bar

In Firefox Mobile, Mozilla attempts to capture some of the core functionality of the desktop version of Firefox and tries to bring those qualities to the mobile browser. The Awesome Bar, shown above, is one such example of this cross-over technology. On the mobile device, the Awesome Bar functions in a manner similar to the desktop client by providing URL entry assistance. Start typing your URL and Firefox will complete your entry by scanning through your browser history and searching your bookmarked and tagged websites.

As many users of Firefox on the desktop know, the desktop version of the Awesome Bar can sometimes be more of a hindrance than a help when it tries to enter a URL on your behalf. On the mobile device, though, it is a welcome feature that makes entering long URLs drop dead easy. By the time you have reached the third or fourth letter past the “www”, Firefox Mobile has a list of potential website addresses that closely match your entry. You don’t have to hunt and peck for letters or search for the “.com” button when you use this feature on Firefox Mobile.

Though the Awesome Bar does perform awesomely, it is not a feature that is unique to Firefox Mobile. Other mobile browsers offer similar functionality and pull up a list of previously visited websites while you are typing in a URL.

Extensions/Add-Ons

Just like the desktop version of Firefox, Firefox Mobile also offers support for add-ons which can be an easy way to add extra functionality to your mobile browser. Though there are not as many extensions for the mobile version of Firefox, the ones that are available are especially suited for the mobile browser. You can add in a mobile extension that allows you to post to Twitter directly from the URL bar, an extension that enables in-browser YouTube videos, a URL fixer add-on that automatically fixes URL typing errors, and even the ever popular Adblock Plus.

Extensions can be added by visiting Firefox’s Add-On web page which when viewed on the N900 will take you directly to the mobile section of Mozilla’s website. Extensions can also be added by accessing the settings menu and navigating to the add-ons menu (shown above) where you can view and configure installed extensions and search for new extensions. Extensions are added via a simple one-click method which will automatically download and install the add-on, just like you would in the desktop browser.

Extensions were well integrated into the mobile browser and we saw no deleterious effect from running, on average, four extensions at a time. The browser remained stable and performed smoothly even with multiple extensions running simultaneously. Being able to add and remove functionality via add-ons is a definite advantage for Firefox Mobile and one that is not currently available on any other mobile platform.

Weave Sync

One of the add-ons that Mozilla pimps is its Weave Sync, which allows you to sync important browser information between your desktop PCs and your mobile device. Weave Sync requires you to install the add-on to your desktop version of Firefox (as shown above) and the mobile browser on the N900. Once the add-on is installed, you will have to create a Weave account and add your login credentials to both the desktop and mobile browser. In the next step, you setup a syncing schedule and you are ready to start syncing your tabs, passwords, history and bookmarks between your desktop and mobile device.

Weave Sync worked well as long as you remember the one golden rule, “Make sure you don’t have 20 tabs open when you sync”. Weave Sync quickly and easily synced open tabs from one client to the other, a feature which is useful when you switch between multiple platforms several times a day. The only time that we ran into a problem was when we accidentally synced a desktop client that had about 20-30 open tabs with the mobile browser. Though Firefox Mobile did not crash, it did slow to a crawl until we were able to exit from the Weave Sync interface and re-sync with a more reasonable number of open tabs. Overall, Weave Sync is an excellent addition to the browser. Being able to access your browser history, passwords, and bookmarks on multiple devices is a feature that we used over and over again.

Web Page Rendering

As seen from the screenshot above and the one below, Firefox Mobile does an excellent job of rendering full websites and formatting them for a mobile device. Because Firefox 3.6 is the underlying engine for Firefox Mobile, websites will serve up the full version of their website. No dumbed-down mobile versions for users of this browser. Even BGR’s website, which is pulled up as a mobile-formatted site on the iPhone and the DROID, rendered out in its full glory in Firefox Mobile. You can see a little issue with the layout of the page, but all in all, things look great on here.

Lest you think we are biased, we also loaded up Amazon (see below) and the New York Times (also below) as a comparison and to show that Firefox Mobile can render even complex content accurately on a mobile device. These beautiful renderings do come with a drawback as Firefox Mobile was a bit on the slow side. The initial content on the pages loaded up quickly but it took a good 15-20 seconds to render the entire content on a complex web page. As expected, mobile websites and simple websites like google.com loaded up in the blink of an eye, but these bigger sites caused Firefox to hiccup ever so slightly. An impatient man who does not let the page finish loading before scrolling downward will be greeted with those unsightly grey and white check boxes.

UI and Overall Impressions

The browser interface was well thought out with the navigational elements of the browser hidden on both the left and right side of the screen. If you swipe from left to right, a left sidebar pops out that lets you open a new tab, displays all open tabs, and provides access to the tabs that are synced to your desktop via Weave. If you swipe from right to left, you will see a right hand navigational bar (as shown below) that allows you to quickly add the current page as a bookmark, navigate forward and backward, and access the browser settings. All in all, Firefox Mobile has a nice layout that allows you to maximize screen real estate and call up the navigational elements only when needed.

When viewing web content on the screen, a double-tap will zoom in and a second double-tap will zoom out. Zooming in and out was smooth but inconsistent at times with double-taps not being registered by the device. Some of this could be attributed to the resistive screen of the N900 which was not as responsive as a capacitive screen or even as responsive as some resistive screens that we have used in the past. In addition to having some issues zooming in and out of a web page, link selection at times was also difficult. When reading forums for example, the tiny navigation controls that allow you to move from page to page were often difficult to select. Sometimes I was able to zoom in on the controls, other times not and when I finally tried to select a link, I often jumped two or three pages ahead instead of one.

In all fairness, double-tapping is not the only means for zooming. Firefox Mobile allows you to use the Ctrl-up and Ctrl-down buttons but using buttons instead of your finger seems counter-intuitive. The same applies to using a stylus. Though one is included with the N900, it just seems so 90′s to use one with a device that is supposedly at the cutting edge of mobile technology.

Despite these nuances, the overall browsing experience was pleasurable. We would recommend Firefox Mobile as a browser for those power users who want the capability of a desktop browser on a mobile device. You may have to compromise some speed, but if you live or die by the extensions that you can install, and dream about syncing your device with every desktop that you own, then Firefox Mobile may be the browser for you. Currently, Firefox Mobile is only available on the Maemo 5-powered Nokia N900. Our experience with the device was mixed and although we really enjoyed it, we’d be hard pressed to buy one just to use Firefox Mobile.  If you have other uses for the N900, then you could probably justify it, but if you can wait until the end of the year, Mozilla is developing an Android version of Firefox Mobile which, at this point in time, promises to be much more interesting than its Maemo counterpart.

Nokia and Intel have jumped on the mobile operating system bandwagon by jointly announcing MeeGo, an open platform for mobile computing devices, tablets, netbooks, smartphones, internet-connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems. MeeGo takes the best of Intel’s Mobilin platform and merges it Maemo, the linux-based operating system that powers the Nokia N900. MeeGo will target a wide range of devices, including both ARM and Intel-based platforms, and will offer users a continuity across devices that is not yet seen with other mobile OS platforms. MeeGo will support the cross-platform Qt application and UI framework which allows developers to code for both MeeGo and Symbian simultaneously. Developers can download the Qt framework now and get cracking on the first MeeGo applications while they wait for the first MeeGo devices to launch in the second half of 2010. Anyone excited for yet another mobile OS to poke, prod and ponder or have we reached the saturation point?

Read

Nokia N900 owners are now the envy of the mobile world having been given the privilege of being the first group of people to use the official finalized version of Firefox Mobile. Firefox Mobile will run on the Maemo 5 platform and incorporates many features seen in the desktop version of Firefox including the Awesome Bar, add-ons, tabbed browsing, location-aware browsing,  and safe browsing which provides you with an instant web ID and allows you to  your easily customize your security settings. Mozilla also introduced Weave Sync, a feature which allows you to sync your tabs, history, bookmarks, and passwords between your desktop and mobile device. Anyone rocking a N900 want to share your first impressions with us?

Read

With Apple and BlackBerry nipping at Nokia’s heels, the Finnish company is planning on making some major changes in 2010. Nokia made some pretty big announcements at its Capital Markets Day yesterday with forecasts for 2010 as well as a demo of a significantly improved Symbian UI. We’ve made a lot of jabs against Symbian looking pretty dated and being in need of a major overhaul, and it looks like Nokia might be finally answering the call. Nokia CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo says:

In 2010, we will drive user experience improvements, and the progress we make will take the Symbian user interface to a new level. As an operating system, Symbian has reach and flexibility like no other platform, and we have measures in place to push smartphones down to new price points globally, while growing margins. I see great opportunity for Nokia to capture new growth in our industry, by creating what we expect to be the world’s biggest platform for services on the mobile.

A better user experience and pushing down price points will definitely help Nokia retain its global lead, but that experience and those new prices are going to have to be really competitive. Interestingly, while Nokia predicts that mobile device volumes will be up 10% in the next year, it sees its own volume market share to be flat in 2010. Whatever Nokia has planned, it’s in it for the long haul.

Read

Although initial reviews have concluded that it’s far from perfect, today marks the first day of availability of the Nokia N900 in the United States. Available through Nokia’s flagship stores in Chicago and New York City for $649 (as well as at nokiausa.com), the N900 has also been spotted on various online shops such as Amazon for a little over $500. At that price it’s all very tempting — especially if you’re a die hard Nseries fan that wants to get a glimpse of the future with this Maemo 5 business– but that’s a decision you’re going to have to make on your own.

Read

According to the Maemo marketing team, it looks like it’s already in motion. Apparently Nokia still has some Nseries devices in the pipeline which will still use S60 as the operating system, but after those are out of the factory, it seems like Maemo will be the OS of choice for Nokia’s Nseries. That doesn’t mean that Nokia has plans to ditch Symbian altogether yet, as the enterprise-friendly Eseries and new Xseries will still run Symbian for the foreseeable future.

Read

Nokia smartphone loyalists that feel S60 is a bit long in the tooth and are looking for something new should be all smiles today, as earlier Nokia announced that the Maemo 5-powered N900 smartphone has begun shipping out after a series of delays. To officially retail for around 500€ ($749 USD), the N900 has been spotted on various US-based websites for well under $600. And that’s a darn good deal, too, because you’re not going to find many phones at that price that offer up the following:

• Maemo 5 OS
• 3.5-inch WVGA (800 x 480) resistive touchscreen display
• 110.9 × 59.8 × 18mm, 181g
• Portrait-orientation sliding QWERTY
• Mozilla-based browser, full Adobe Flash support
• ARM cortex A8 processor
• 32GB internal memory
• 5.0 MP Carl Zeiss camera with dual-LED flash, auto-focus and sliding cover
• MicroSDHC support up to 16GB
• FM transmitter
• Quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE, WCDMA 900/1700/2100, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with A2DP
• GPS
• 1320 mAh battery

One word of caution: as it currently stands, the N900 will not play nice with the new SIMs from 3 in the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark and Austria, although a software update to resolve this comparability issue is due out before the end of the year. A launch video from Nokia is lying in wait after the jump.

Read

We know many of you are close to dying and holding your breath for the awesome Nokia flagship device, the Maemo-packing N900. It was probably a big tease when we told you guys it was going to hit U.S. distribution centers on September 27, but for some untold reason sales planned for October have been delayed and it will go on sale in November. In just days T-Mobile will be making its Even More and Even More Plus plans available, and the N900 will totally support the network’s 3G, and several of our readers are waiting to jump on this handset/carrier combo. Just be prepared to fork over somewhere in the neighborhood of $650 – $700 for the device itself and you’ll be good to go. You’ve waited this long, what’s another week or two?

Read

Oh Project Dark, you are a curious one. We here at BGR think we know what you’re all about, but it’s pretty hard to feel totally confident without some proof in the form of documents. Thankfully a leaked picture of some T-Mobile advertising which looks to be a part of Project Dark has emerged, and seems to more or less confirm what we’ve been saying for nearly a week. Right off the bat we noticed the tagline of “coverage you need, price you want and the handset you crave.” Gee, you think that could refer to a rapid 21Mbps HSPA roll-out, a $50 unlimited plan and handsets like the Behold II, Bold 9700, CLIQ and N900? We certainly do, but we’re more interested in something else. We’ve always thought that Project Dark had a single unlimited plan, but the mention of an “Even More” and “Even More Plus” rate plan has us a bit  confused. Sure, it makes sense and all to have a few different unlimited plans that offer up different things, but just what is it that the Plus plan includes? We haven’t a clue to be completely honest (although we are working on it), but perhaps — and this is nothing but us thinking aloud –  it could include some sort of long distance package that is meant to compete with AT&T’s GoPhone. Regardless, all will be solved soon (we’re hearing either this Sunday or the next), but for now we must tip our hats for T-Mobile for actually being able to keep its employees mouths shut. Bravo.

Read

Get those credit cards ready, Nokia fans. According to a notice reportedly sent out to several US distributors, Nokia’s first Maemo phone is scheduled to hit Nokia distribution centers on September 27th — just under two weeks from today. Assuming the communique is real and Nokia can manage to stay on target, we could see the N900 begin to ship to customers via distributors within the first few days of October. Though it’s not a surprise, the lofty $650 MSRP is sure to leave a sour taste in some mouths but if you want to be among the first to own a T-Mobile 3G-ready Maemo 5 handset, the early adopter tax is unavoidable. Hit the jump for the alleged notice to distributors.

Read