iPhone only: When you see a book, CD, DVD, or game at a friend's house you want to look up and bookmark instantly, fire up SnapTell Explorer on your iPhone and take a photo of it. Similar to a bar code scanner (except you photograph the item cover, not its bar code), SnapTell automatically looks up your item and gives you links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Wikipedia, and straight-up search engines so you can compare prices and find out more about it. SnapTell's results aren't 100% accurate—once it gave me a strategy guide result when I photographed a video game cover—but everything else I tried it on, the results were spot-on. Here's what the result for the Halo 3 photograph looked like.

SnapTell pulls in the official product image and gives you links to look it up in places like Amazon and Wikipedia. If you hit the "Share this product" button you can email the item to someone. (What it needs to do—and maybe in a future iteration—is display prices and details here, with these links below them.)

Your SnapTell results get stored in a single list, called "My Snaps." It would be nice to set up multiple lists (like "wishlist" or "gift ideas for my sweetie") but right now it's only a single list.

One of the most impressive apps we tried on the G1 phone running Android was the Compare Everywhere bar code scanner that does photo-lookups just like this. While SnapTell doesn't offer the same amount of detail and on-the-spot price comparison, for iPhone owners, it's a fast and easy way to instantly capture products of interest. SnapTell Explorer is a free download for the iPhone and iPod touch. SnapTell Explorer [via TechCrunch]

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Adobe plans to demonstrate today a version of Flash 10 working on a Windows Mobile phone, and a spokesperson says an Android version is also in the works. The Flash maker is also working closely with chip-maker ARM to optimize mobile Flash, but as for a version for iPhones (which run on ARM chips): It's "up to Apple." [via]

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According to the MIT Technology Review, Adobe is working with mobile processor manufacturer ARM on optimizing Flash Player 10 and AIR for ARM processors. Why does this matter? Because ARM processors are found in 90% of mobile phones (iPhone and G1 included), not to mention set top boxes, PMPs, and gaming devices (like the Nintendo DS). And how will they do it? Adobe and ARM say they have three main areas they're working on to improve the mobile flash experience.

First, they're customizing the compiler specifically for the ARMv6 and ARMv7 processors, which will help speed up and smooth out communications between the processor and the app. Second, they're going to take advantage of the graphics subprocessors found in some ARM chips. Flash on desktops isn't optimized for any sort of graphics processor, but taking advantage of this on a mobile platform will not only help with the workload, but it will improve battery life at the same time. Lastly, they're making video compression and decompression better suited for the processors, so that it requires less horsepower.

It should come as no huge surprise that Adobe says Flash 10 will be running on ARM devices by next year, considering that they already announced plans for the software on the iPhone and G1. It will not only make it easier to view sites with rich web content, but it will also be easier to view and upload flash videos, and run flash-based apps. [MIT Technology Review]

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Live Mesh Adds Mac, Windows Mobile Clients (Mac, Windows, Windows Mobile)"Live Mesh, the cloud-based Windows Live service that can synchronize files to the cloud or across computers, has gotten quite a few updates since we last checked out the "tech preview.""Best Android Apps to Boost Your Mobile Productivity (So Far) (Android)"The first phone running Android has been out in the wild for two weeks now, and every day new applications have appeared in the Android Market that add fun and functionality to your handset."Gmail Backup Archives Your Email Account (All platforms)"Gmail Backup saves and restores complete archives of your Gmail email account using Gmail's built-in IMAP capability."Sharepod Frees Your iPod From iTunes (Windows)"You don't have administrative rights or iTunes at work, but you want to be sure you can beat box along to your favorite Kenny G album blasting from the Dell OEM speakers in your cubicle?"AlwaysVPN Takes U.S.-Only Sites International (All platforms)"AlwaysVPN, a free virtual private networking service, is promoted as a safer way for anyone to browse the web or trading files over a public net connection. It works for that purpose, sure, but it also lets anyone on the disappointing side of a U.S.-only service like Hulu, Pandora, or Fancast get around that often arbitrary restriction."Parallels 4 Released, 50% Faster than Parallels 3 (Mac)"The original Windows-on-Mac virtualization software Parallels—which we've used to run Windows and Mac apps side-by-side, set Windows programs as defaults on a Mac, and boot our Boot Camp partition from inside OS X—has just updated to Parallels 4."Go-oo Takes the Bloat Out of OpenOffice.org (Windows, Linux)"Free application Go-oo is a fork of the popular Microsoft Office alternative OpenOffice.org with a focus on improved speed and performance."WinAudit Creates Seriously Extensive System Profiles (Windows)"Free system profiler WinAudit is similar in some ways to the previously mentioned System Information for Windows, being a no-install-needed executable and offering exhaustive amounts of data on your system."WinWget Makes Automated Downloads a Breeze (Windows)"Any Unix-friendly dude or lady will tell you that Wget packs a ton of power for such a small terminal command."MiniTask is a Lightweight To-Do Tracker (All platfroms with Adobe AIR)"Free Adobe AIR application MiniTask is a lightweight task manager with a surprising number of features."

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Companies that aren't Canon or Nikon have it rough in the digital camera market—particularly outside the cheap point-and-shoot area. Some band together for strength in numbers, creating cooperative standards like Panasonic, Olympus and Leica's new Micro Four Thirds system—a spec for smaller cameras with digital viewfinders like a compact, but interchangeable lenses, manual controls and higher performance like a DSLR. We tested Panasonic's 13-megapixel Lumix G1, paying close attention to the fact that it's the first contender in a totally new camera category and—like that other G1, the Android smartphone—it sets the stage for what's to come.

There is a single photo that you should think long and hard about before deciding whether to plunk down $800 for the G1. And oddly enough, it wasn't even shot with the camera itself. Want to see it?

Yeah, there it is—the G1 posing next to my Canon Rebel XT. As you can see, for all practical purposes, they are the same size and shape. The G1 is smaller by a hair, but unless you're carrying both at the exact same time, it's a difference you would never, ever think about. This seemingly small fact completely undermines the system's potential to set itself apart from the big boys' entry-level DSLRs, which are the G1's direct competitors whether Panasonic likes it or not. The G1 fails to deliver on Micro Four Thirds' potential to produce cameras with small, unique form factors—those Leica-style "digital rangefinders" we pined for when the system was announced—that could be very worthy of your consideration. For now, an entry level Canon or Nikon DSLR is a better bet, coming in with humongous lens and accessory systems and lower price tags.

The thing is, a Micro Four Thirds camera doesn't have to look like a conventional DSLR. There is no pentaprism, which allows for a direct through-the-lens viewfinder in a DSLR and is responsible for the traditional bulge up top. There is no long legacy of lenses and hardware that dictate how the camera body should be formed. But there the G1 is, with its faux prism bulge and totally traditional DSLR shape.

Panasonic apparently chose this route to drive home the fact that the G1 is a serious camera, not just a gussied-up point-and-shoot. I guess that makes some logical sense for a minute, but for people who buy an $800 camera based on more criteria than just the way the body looks (read: most), it will probably prove to be a fatal mistake. Which is too bad, because when form factor is ruled out, Micro Four Thirds' unique characteristics show a lot of potential for greatness. Let's look at those.

Live Viewfinder When you look through the G1's viewfinder, you see a digital image of the sensor's live view output. Generally this is a really terrible way to compose a photograph, but the G1's is actually really usable. It's not jerky at all in good light (it does tend to slow down in low-light, though), and it's sharp, bright and clear for focusing thanks to a resolution of 1,440,000 dots. It's the best digital viewfinder I've ever used personally.

For auto focus, the G1 uses a 23-area contrast-based system, again because there is no mirror to reflect light to a dedicated AF sensor found in most DSLRs (contrast detection is also occasionally used by DSLRs when they're in live view or video capture mode). It tended to work well in good light and in bad. Manual focus is also possible, but a zoomed-in view PIP-style—like many DSLRs have—would have been nice.

There is a dedicated button for switching between the digital viewfinder and the LCD, which you can swivel out from the camera's back. There's a sensor next to the viewfinder that automatically switches between the two depending on where your face is.

The Sensor Micro Four Thirds (like the Four Thirds true-DSLR system that came before it) gets its name from the 4:3 aspect ratio of its 13-megapixel "Live MOS" sensor. The sensor is basically a hybrid compact/DSLR type—the 4:3 aspect ratio is more common in compacts (although you can set the aspect ratio to the more traditional DSLR standard 3:2 easily), but the sensor's physical size is more on par with the APS-C sensors found in low-end DSLRs. That's a good thing, because a bigger sensor always equals less noise at high ISO sensitivities, more control over limited depth of field, and better image quality all around. That's why the prospect of a truly compact camera with a Micro Four Thirds sensor is so exciting.

As you can see, though, with the lens removed the sensor is directly exposed to the elements. If you have an industrial grade clean room in your house, I would advise changing lenses in there. Dust spots on your sensor are the worst.

Interchangeable Lenses Right now there are only two Micro Four Thirds lenses: The 14-45mm/F3.5-5.6 kit lens and a 45-200mm/F4.0-5.6 telephoto zoom. Thankfully, you can mate the G1 with the larger selection of standard Four Thirds lenses via an adapter (which includes some nice high-end Leica glass). Here you see a Lumix/Leica 14-40mm mounted.

Controls Controls and menus are generally well thought out. There's a bunch of flexibility built in here—from the customizable ISO intervals (full or 1/3 stop) to the handy Quick Menu—which lets you access just about all of the basic shooting functions from within the viewfinder without diving into a menu.

Mad props for the clickable main scroll wheel. I don't know if this is standard on Panasonic's other performance cameras, but it's incredibly helpful—a single press cycles between controlling the aperture or shutter speed (depending on your mode) to setting a quick exposure compensation or going between shutter and aperture in full manual mode, all with a single wheel. Nice.

I can easily live with the annoyances noted above, balanced as they are by the niceties I also mentioned. However, the G1 does have three drawbacks that, when considered with the baffling form factor decision, are dealbreakers:

ISO Noise Noise levels are not great. Here you can see a progression of shots from ISO 100 to ISO 3200. As you can see, ISO 3200 is pretty useless: galleryPost('g1isoseries', 6, ''); And here, a quick and dirty crop comparison with a Rebel XT (which is three generations old, keep in mind) at ISO 1600 (the XT's max). Even my three-year-old Rebel does better at ISO 1600. The Micro Four Thirds sensor is large, but it's still smaller than APS-C and not as adept at handling noise as Canon or Nikon sensors, which get trickle-down sensor tech from noise-busting high-end cameras.

No Video This makes absolutely no sense: The G1 does not have a video capture mode, even though all the challenges of recording video on a DSLR are completely non-existent here. Panasonic has said that its future Micro Four Thirds cams will have HD video. This is precisely where the system has a natural leg-up on entry-level DSLRs and it's a shame—perhaps a fatal omission—that the G1 couldn't take part.

Cost Panasonic G1 with 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens: $799 Canon EOS Rebel XSi with 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens: $669 Nikon D60 with 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens: $599 As long as that's the competitive landscape, the G1 has no chance.

Conclusion I am optimistic about Micro Four Thirds, but there's just no reason anyone should buy a G1. Less money could get you a real DSLR that is, for all practical purposes, the same size. The G1's digital viewfinder is excellent, but it's no comparison to looking at the real world as you shoot. Factor in the G1's relatively poor high-ISO performance and tiny lens selection and it's a no brainer.

All is not lost for Micro Four Thirds. Remember Sigma's DP-1, the super-compact, rangefinder-looking point-and-shoot that packed a DSLR-sized sensor and manual controls? Micro Four Thirds could add to that paradigm a great electronic viewfinder and a system of interchangeable lenses. How about a Leica M-looking body with a few interchangeable prime (not zoom) lenses? What about using tons of legacy Leica lenses via a rumored M-mount adapter, in addition to the Leica (non-Micro) Four Thirds lenses that already exist? Sign me up for that any day. There is hope that a remedy is coming soon, as Olympus, Panasonic's partner in this endeavor, will unveil its Micro Four Thirds camera early next year. For now, though, it's back to the drawing board for Panasonic, and back to DSLRs for me.

Test Shots All full-resolution shots straight from the camera with no cropping or processing. galleryPost('G1testshots', 17, '');

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The Tesla dealership is quiet as a cage of sleeping panthers. A pack of the electric roadsters, in varying degrees of grey, are strewn across the show floor looking 120mph standing still. I imagine most of them are awaiting for a venture capitalist to pick them up and take them from meeting to meeting for the rest of their uneventful lives. But outside is a bright blue roadster ready for the 10 minutes Telsa and God have handed me. This is my long awaited drive in the Tesla roadster.

galleryPost('Tesladrive', 3, '');

[Photos by Monica Laipple and Giz, drive via Tim Ferriss]

Studying her lines it is clear to me this car has Lotus DNA, even though the car is much cleaner and classically beautiful looking than any bug eyed Elise or Exige, and more technologically advanced than the submarine Lotus James Bond drove in The Spy Who Loved Me (Thanks Ray). The British car maker helped to design the aluminum chassis, which weighs less than 200 pounds, and they handle early stage manufacturing. Tesla stresses that the Roadster is not just an electric Lotus, and it shares no more than 10% of the parts. Much more thought went into this car to simply dismiss it as such. But Tesla's engineers did choose to work with Lotus for a reason, the same reason why most auto journalists consider the Elise one of the last pure sports cars around and a great deal. The low power, light weight cars are simply one of the best handling and thrilling drives out there, described as some as a street legal go kart, and I'd agree that its one of the best driving experiences I've ever had. With shared genetics, this is perhaps the best way to judge the limits of electric performance as compared to their gas counterparts.

It's rare that Tesla lets people drive the car without a company copilot, so we'd be tailed by a Lexus chase car since I'm sitting copilot to Tim Ferriss, the guy who set up this ride, for the first shift. Starting the car is silent, and we kept trying to turn it over because we're idiots. If you don't step on the gas, there is no idle, so the car does not move forward even when your feet are not on the brakes. When Tim takes off from the lot, before I hear road noise and wind, I hear the odd purring of gears, which can almost be described as turbine like. With one gear and no engine noise, its surprisingly hard to gauge speed except by the pressure applied to the headrest by the back of your skull, the churning in your stomach or the unintended roller coaster face of your passenger. (Me.) Looking at the speedometer would be idiotic at these rates, in local traffic, but somehow we make it to about 60 for brief bursts on our way to the highway.

The rates to 60 are rated at 3.9 seconds by virtue of the electric motor's 248 HP and 280 Torque. By comparison, it bests the fastest road legal Lotus by a 10th of a second, but the power to weigh ratio is on par with the standard Elise because the battery pack brings it to 2700 pounds (over 700 pounds heavier than the Elise). The key here is that the car doesn't have to take the time to switch gears and electric motors deliver 100% of their torque at start. That power curve caused some problems earlier in two previous transmissions, which were being destroyed after a few thousand miles. To overcome that problem with the latest, more durable single gear tranny, Telsa wisely used a motor with a 14000 RPM redline that could keep rotating faster in a low gear to achieve a top speed of 125MPH, while improving on the 2008's single gear transmission time to sixty miles per hour down from 5.7 seconds to 3.9 seconds.

Behind the wheel, I found that the entire system works together to deliver power like thick gobs of thick yogurt, with no drive lash on throttle or lift, but not too buzzy either. I have to admit it's the perfect amount of torque for a car this weight, somewhere in between detroit muscle and a peaky four banger in a rice rocket. With traction control off, something I was prohibited from doing, I hear you can do doughnuts in the car, something not too easy in many roadsters. That's what I heard, anyhow. In some ways, it feels automatic, without the third pedal, but when you lift off the throttle, the car's regenerative systems seize power through engine braking. It feels like you're lifting off after revving high in second or third gear in a manual transmission sports car. Tim often didn't have to use the brakes, preferring to wind down to almost nothing by engine braking alone. I'd test the brakes later. We'd entered the highway, and the car's acceleration to 80 was great, but power tapered off closer to 110 as aerodynamics of a open top car caught up to it and torque fell. Hypothetically.

I knew the acceleration was appropriate for a car of the future, besting many gas vehicles out there. But one thing I'd never heard about was what all the battery weight (again, 2700 pounds vs sub 2000 pounds) was doing to the car's handling; the Tesla would not likely turn and brake like a space age wonder considering similar chassis, brakes, wheels and suspension There's no escaping the laws of physics. Even magical electric cars want to stay in motion, when in motion.

I snaked the car through a set of S turns, but behind other cars, so I was not able to find much data other than the car's does not oversteer easily. Through a banked onramp to highway 280, the ghetto skidpad, I wasn't light on the gas, and on the smooth, 270 degree banked circle, I could feel the car's rack and pinion wanting to push a bit. I wasn't sure of my speed, so its impossible to say when confidence was starting to fade. The chase car driver later implied they had to slow down 60 on the ramp, but I doubt I was going much faster than that. I'll conclusively say that the car handles less confidently than an Elise, but will destroy many road going sedans and coupes.

Back off the highway, with the chase car still catching up, I got a chance to try the brakes quickly rounding a corner and heading towards traffic. With a second lane opening up, I slammed them. Warm tires and chattered across the rough, slightly downhill road and I was forced to take the other lane or eat SUV. I felt the weight, and expected the car to stop shorter.

But here's something to chew on. I have no conclusive data of how fast we were going, given the singlegear, quiet propulsion of the vehicle. I could have been going 35, I could have been going 60, so it's not fair to judge the car's handling or braking. And Tesla and the internet have no skidpad, slalom or braking distance test results for the car. Conspiracy? I can't say. None of this really matters, because the Tesla Roadster is unique as a performance oriented electric car and deserves heaps of praise for what it is and how it feels to drive despite its efficiency from battery to wheels of 80-90%. Most gas engines sit at about 20%. Provided your public utility has some measure of efficiency to their electric production, you can do a lot of good in this car.

I wouldn't be describing this car properly without describing the interior. The Roadster's insides look similar but have been improved over its sister cars from the UK. Door sills have been lowered to make entrance easy (although still requiring some level of acrobatics) the leather seats are more comfortable and heated, the premium stereo is a single DIN JVC KD-NX5000, which features DivX and DVD playback, as well as navigation and a 40GB HDD and iPod dock. The position of the stereo is sort of low on the dashboard. The stereo's imaging is superb and there's a sub somewhere in the tiny cockpit thumping away. There's an electric touch LCD on the left managing battery charge, tire pressure monitors, etc. Your ass is dragging probably 8 inches from the ground.

I can't afford this car. If I wanted something similar to this in shape, feel and performance, I'd probably buy a used Elise for $30k if I could get over the bug eyes. But I can assure you that a Tesla is still a hell of a a car, by electric or gas terms, even if its just a bit more portly and more expensive than a comparable Lotus. I mean, its fast. It's electric. It's efficient. It's sexy. And you can actually buy it if you're rich. And while Tesla as a company may have had some problems in manufacturing at first, they didn't wait for old industry to get off its ass and build something revolutionary. Like Android, I hope it catalyzes the fossil fuel makers traditional makers into a game of catch up with cars that are just as fast and efficient, and hopefully a lot cheaper. And if that doesn't leave you somewhat impressed, then you belong with the dinosaurs.

Note: Impressions from a 10 minute drive are going to be impressions from a 10 minute drive, nothing more.

[Special Thanks to Tim Ferriss for facilitating this drive and donating half of his drive time to me, and for photographer Monica Laipple for the better shots above. Some more videos over at Tim's site. ]

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Microsoft's $15 Zune Pass subscription service—a pretty sweet deal already—has just porked up their offer by giving you 10 free songs that you can keep every month. We've talked about Zune Pass in our Zune reviews before, but it's basically access to all of the Zune Marketplace for only the price of a CD a month. Since most of their catalog (90% or so, including all the majors and a few indie labels) is already in MP3 format, you can load these free songs on any kind of device you want, like your iPhone or Android phone or PS3 or Wii.

They're also announcing the addition of Universal Music Group and Sony BMG to the MP3 DRM-less format (DRM-less as long as you buy the music), the last bits to complete their "majors" MP3 collection. We think the deal is hotness as long as you're OK with the fact that you're renting, not buying; well, you're now "buying" those ten tracks a month, in essence. [Zune]

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Quickpedia isn't the only Wikipedia-scouring app for Google Android, but it's the best we've seen so far.

The free application makes it easy to search and browse Wikipedia for articles, throwing in a few tiny twists along the way to make navigating, reading, and learning interesting tidbits a breeze.

You can see it all unfold in this First Look video.

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

iSuppli says T-Mobile G1 costs $144 to make, nothing to love originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So you'd think a company like Google would probably have a free line-jumping pass when it comes to getting its iPhone apps approved for the App Store by Apple? Especially when the app in question is as cool-looking as the voice search app we got a look at Friday but has yet to hit the store? Well, sadly, you'd be wrong.

Tech Crunch is sourcing someone close to the affair as saying that Apple left Google completely in the dark as to why the app didn't make it into the store on Friday, as previously planned. Google keeps an airtight lock on their news, and John Markoff's piece in the NYT was supposed to accompany the app's release.

Arrington's source says despite getting a green light for a Friday release, Friday came and went without Google hearing anything from Apple other than the "In Review" status message in the automated SDK tools. Why this happened is anyone's guess, but it's merely the latest (and one of the most glaring) examples of Apple's completely backwards app approval process.

Arrington also makes a great point that Google totally did Apple a favor by releasing this app first for the iPhone, and not Android. But even that wasn't enough for even a little extra love. Yikes. [Tech Crunch]

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Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

CHART KEY: Number value is time for complete page load in seconds; page rendering is rated from "Fail" to "Excellent" for each; and the color (red, yellow, green) indicates overall performance taking into account both speed and rendering accuracy: Green = good overall, Red = fail overall.

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go: Android A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60 Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.