I updated the firmware in my TG01 so it now has Windows Mobile 6.5. I care little for most of the UI improvements as I use SPB Mobile Shell which provides the perfect smartphone UI. What has pleased me no end is that the update fixed a piece of TG01 flakiness: the reliability of bluetooth connections. I’ve read reports of this from other people. It would often take many attempts to re-connect a bluetooth device after disconnection and you could be fiddling about for a while getting it to recognise your headset again. This fix has resulted in me blogging on the TG01 when I am out and about using a fold-up bluetooth keyboard. That excellent boozer The Greenwich Union has free Wifi and I have been reporting on the beers live from the pub.

The other mobile thing that has tickled my fancy is the new beta version of Opera Mobile that is out, Opera Mobile 10. It is hilariously fast, in terms of downloading content and also panning and zooming about on pages. It is a very mature browsing platform and you do not feel limited by browsing on a phone.

If you are using a Windows Mobile phone that has a turn of speed to it (in terms of having OpenGL ES accelerated graphics) I’ve been playing two free 3D games which look just wonderful. Experiment 13 is a entertaining 3D puzzle game that has you warping gravity in order to save your avatar from the world he finds himself in. The Electopia demo doesn’t have the greatest control system in the world, but it is another looker of a 3D game. My long-time reader will know I like Xtrakt, a 3D shooty/racing kind of game. There is a lot of fun to be had with these new whizzy phones and mine certainly eats into the reading time.

As I’ve mentioned, I generally use Opera Mobile 9.7 as the browser on my Toshiba TG01 Windows Phone. It is a really fast and transparently simple browser. The beta version of this that is on the Opera website does not work with the TG01, but if you go here you can download a more recent build that will work.

I like Opera Mobile so much I’ve been thinking for a while about trying the desktop version. Last night I downloaded and installed the 10.10 Beta and so far I am quite pleased with it. It supports ad blocking ‘out of the box’, has a spellchecker, will sync bookmarks across computers and comes with Opera Unite.

Opera Unite is a built-in file and web server in the browser. System administrators’ hair is probably curling at this point with horror about how insecure this is, but it seems quite handy to me. You can share your media files as well, which is quite nifty, so you can have your music collection anywhere you can connect to the internet.

So, do I have any general views on the best browser I’ve used? Much as I like Microsoft software, I only use IE8 in compatibility mode to connect to sites that code against the IE6 ‘standard’. I’ve been pretty happy with Firefox as a general browser, but as to whether Opera 10.10 is better I cannot yet say. I’ve set Opera to be my default browser and I’ll play with it for a few weeks.

The first beta release of Opera Mobile 9.7 did not work on the Toshiba TG01, it had a lot of screen corruption. This lead me to try out other browsers and whilst I was pretty pleased with Netfront I had preferred the browsing experience using Opera Mobile.

Consequently, I am very pleased to report that a new build of Opera Mobile 9.7 is in the wild which works just fine on the TG01. You can get it here. It is very fast, looks good and works! Hooray! If you are responsible enough to change settings in your TG01’s registry I’d suggest you change the key ‘HKLM\Software\Opera\Prefs\Adaptive Zoom\Default zoom’ to 100. Doing this sets the default zoom to a level which looks good on the TG01’s screen*.

I think I would be serving my noble reader poorly if I did not mention that it is possible to install a full Flash Player v9.x on this version of Opera Mobile. Check out the instructions here.

*Edit: You don’t have to fiddle about with the registry to change this. If you type the url opera:config into the address bar you can change the default zoom level under the ‘Adaptive zoom’ tab to whatever you fancy.

I’ve spent much time playing with different web browsers on my TG01 (and the Xperia X1 before it) and, if I may, I’ll share some thoughts about them with you.

Opera Mobile 9.7 beta 1 was very good on the Xperia: fast, responsive and very good at rendering pages. Then I upgraded to the TG01 and found that there was a lot of screen corruption. I had to down-grade to Opera Mobile 9.5 beta 2. Unsurprisingly, Opera don’t have this on their website any more as it is an old version, so if you need it you’ll have to search for a torrent. The good thing about using 9.5 is it implements the ad-blocking urlfilter.ini which I have mentioned before. The irritating thing about this version is it uses the standard Windows Mobile onscreen keyboard by default and it is rather slow to change the keyboard each time you need to type something.

The other browser I regularly used on the Xperia was Iris 1.1.9. This is also no longer available for download as the maker has been purchased by a non-Windows Mobile friendly company. You can still find it on some download sites and there must be a torrent somewhere. I use Iris almost exclusively for viewing Google Reader. Iris pretends to be Safari on an iPhone (they both use the Webkit engine to render pages) so you get the good iPhone layout for Reader which works best on a mobile device.

I am a recent convert to the Netfront v3.5 brower for Windows Mobile Concept Version. The first thing you have to do when you install this is change the default font, the one it uses ‘out of the box’ is awful, but once you’ve done that you’ll find it is a fast, good-looking, capable browser which just zips along on the TG01.

Finally, after much fiddling about with other browsers for Windows Mobile I have, for the first time in a while, installed a non-IE browser on my desktop: Firefox 3.5 to be precise. The UI looks good and seems easy enough to get to grips with. Much as I like the ad-blocking feature of Opera Mobile I also love the Adblock Plus plug-in for Firefox. I’ll still use IE8 with some sites, but for the moment Firefox seems perfectly useful.

I am so pleased with the new phone that I feel safe selling my old Xperia X1; the TG01 is serving me well.

It is slightly annoying that Opera Mobile 9.7 beta 1 has loads of display corruption on it. It is a real shame as it would be super snappy and quick on this phone. Because Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 6.1 is rubbish (even if it does have Flash support in this version) I have installed Opera Mobile 9.5 beta 2. If you want this it is best to go looking on torrent sites, obviously Opera are not providing what is an old version of their browser for people to download. I occasionally load up the Iris 1.1.9 browser, for no other reason than to see if it makes a difference. It generally doesn’t, but it strikes me that Opera is a bit faster. Skyfire is crap.

The other thing that I decided was too rubbish to live with was the ‘rotating blinds’ UI that ships with the TG01; it is total toss. So I have purchased and installed SPB Mobile Shell, a great finger-friendly UI which keeps you generally away from the base OS. Not that I have any real problem with the base OS, but as I’ve probably mentioned I really like Windows Mobile.

I am surprised how well I am getting on with the virtual keyboard and generally not using a stylus. I have tried to connect the Bluetooth keyboard, and it works, but I don’t feel I need it as the virtual keyboard seems good enough. It is perhaps an obvious solution to the finger-unfriendliness of Windows Mobile 6.1 that if you have a larger display all of the widgets will be bigger and so easier to hit with your fingertips. The display itself is totally wonderful. After having a 3” display on the Xperia the 4.1” screen on the TG01 (although they are both of the same resolution) is a treat for the eyes. Games look fantastic on this screen.

So, I await the next release of Opera Mobile and fritter away the time until then playing Need for Speed on this very speedy phone.

I couldn’t resist it in the end and got the Toshiba TG01. So far I am very pleased with it. The screen is amazing and it is super snappy with its 1GHz processor. The on-screen keyboard seems easy enough to use. If I have any vaguely interesting thoughts about it I shall post them.

As my regular reader will know I have a bit of a thing for gadgets. I am tempted to buy a new one, the Toshiba TG01. There are a few things that tickle my fancy about this phone: a 4.1inch 800x480 screen, a 1GHz CPU, a whizzy GPU and an accelerometer plus all of the other features of my current Xperia X1. However, it does not have a keyboard, it has an onscreen one.

The partner has constantly been going on and on to me about how I should be buying an iPhone as he likes his so much. One of the reasons I’ve given is that I don’t like onscreen keyboards. I also think the screen on the iPhone has a pretty ropey resolution. When I had my Nokia N800 internet tablet the first accessory I got for it was a Bluetooth keyboard. I briefly had an HTC Touch Diamond and didn’t really like it as it had an onscreen keyboard and even the larger one it came with that was designed for its high resolution display was poor.

Before all of these I had an i-mate Jasjar (a rebranding of the HTC Universal). OK, it was a brick, but I loved its high resolution display and its keyboard. Why did I stop using it? Because I knackered it installing custom ROMs. Ah well…

So has technology moved on far enough for onscreen keyboards to be useful? Some people think so, maybe I should give them another try. One of the good things about the TG01 is that it has USB host capabilities and Bluetooth so if I really want to type a lot I can attach a keyboard.

One of the things that strikes me about phones like the TG01, and I would include the iPhone in that list, is that they are mature, convergent devices. They are phones, media players, gaming devices, internet tablets, navigation tools, cameras, PIMs and work tools. Little, connected computers in your pocket, basically. Speaking as a superannuated toddler I remember when such things were science fiction.