Year: 2009

I finally decided on PockeTwit for posting to Twitter from my phone. The app has an Iphone like interface with smooth scrolling menus and a full screen display. The developer is actively adding features to it and is very quick to respond to bug reports and general support questions. There’s just one trick to getting used to it, especially on a smartphone. You need to scroll left and right to get to the menus that have all of the post, reply, time line and settings. Once you get used to that you’re good to go.

Opera Mobile also has some built in keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. Since I couldn’t find these documented anywhere very well here’s what I’ve found through trial and error:

• 1 – Open URL dialog (also includes history and bookmarks)
• 2 – Window list
• 3 – Home page
• 5 – Toggle images (requires page refresh)
• 6 – Page up
• 8 – Next window
• 9 – Page Down
• * – Full Screen
• # – Toggle between desktop and fit to screen display
• Space – Page down

After trying to get Pocket IE (the Windows Mobile version of Internet Explorer) to behave nicely, and display web pages quickly and in a usable format I finally gave up. I switched to Opera Mobile. It’s not free, but with Firefox Mobile still a ways off the $25 is well spent. Some things that it does better than IE include:

• Formatting pages better for the smaller screen
• Handles multiple windows with ease
• Quicker forward an back functions
• Faster as-you-type URL auto completion
• Quicker loading, rendering and scrolling of large pages
• Option for reporting itself as a desktop browser in case you don’t want the mobile version

There’s a 30-day free trial, so you can try it out yourself before buying it.