In this article I will highlight the gesture navigation and guide you through the massive amount of settings you can control behind the scenes of this browser. I will also provide a general overview of Dolphin’s more standard features, many of which are mentioned above.

Gesture Navigation

Touchscreens are the most exciting characteristic of modern phones and tablets. Unfortunately, many apps don’t use the full potential of this key feature. While many functions can be controlled via intuitive use of touch buttons, some actions still require us to click our way through menus, much like we would do with an external mouse. This is where gesture navigation is more convenient and faster than clicking through menus.

To access gesture navigation in Dolphin Browser HD, touch the hand symbol in the bottom left corner.

You can then draw your gesture across the entire screen.

To view all gestures and access gesture settings, touch the > Draw a gesture button in the bottom right corner whilst in gesture mode.

Within gesture settings you can also add new gestures. Touch the respective button in the top right.

Here you can add gestures for custom URLs, to find something specific on the page, select text, save page, zoom in or out, search, and many more actions. Each action comes with a recommended gesture, but you can also create your own.

Behind The Scenes: Settings Galore

Dolphin Browser HD has a very simplistic interface and it does not look like much at first glance. However, through the browser settings you have access to a whole world of additional features and options. Click the > Android toolbar button highlighted in red in the screenshot below, then > More, and > Settings.

The degrees of freedom in terms of customization and additional features is almost overwhelming. In fact, it provides the same amount of depth as a desktop browser.

Within Dolphin settings, you can control basic preferences, such as default user agent (mobile or desktop view of websites), volume button action, screen orientation, net tab settings, and more.

The page content settings give you access to your preferred site layout as in text size, default zoom, text encoding, image loading, or enabled scripts and plugins. These settings are highly valuable as it allows you to customize the browser not only to meet your personal preferences, but also to better operate within the limitations of your Android device.

In data storage settings you can clear various stored browser data, for example the browser cache, HTML5 data, or Webzine cache. You can also change where downloaded files are saved, make a cache save to an SD card, or view advanced settings for individual websites.

The privacy & security settings evolve around preferences for cookies, form data, passwords, location awareness, security warning, and browsing history.

Under Backup & Restore you can backup and restore your entire browser settings, bookmarks, and web data to an SD card. You can also set a password for your backup. Here you can also import bookmarks from other browsers.

Furthermore, you can control the settings for the Dolphin Browser HD Webzine, sign up for updates, reset the browser to default, access the about page, go through the setup wizard, and create or access your Dolphin account.

Additional Features

Add-Ons

Are you missing a key feature? Maybe there is an add-on for it! There are more than 60 add-ons available for Dolphin Browser HD. Many popular add-ons have paved the way for inbuilt features. A list of add-ons sorted by category and reviews for each can be found on the Dolphin Browser Blog.

SideBars

Dolphin offers a left-hand (bookmarks) and right-hand (toolbar) sidebar, which open by swiping the browser window to the right or left, respectively. The Toolbar is home to add-on buttons.

Webzine & Speed Dial

Both these features find a home in new tabs and you can switch between them via two tabs embedded in the tab itself.

Some more features are found in most modern browsers:

• Multi-Touch-Zoom.
• Tabbed Browsing.
• Smart Address Bar.
• User Agent Switching.

Also see the list of Most Popular Features on the Dolphin Browser homepage for a commented overview.

If you like this browser, also have a look at the 5 Must Have Add-Ons For The Dolphin Browser On Your Android Honeycomb Tablet.

What is your favorite Android browser and if it’s not Dolphin Browser HD, how does it compare in your opinion?

Adobe will continue releasing security updates and bug fixes for the already existing versions, but the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook will be the last official one. Others who have licensed Adobe’s code are permitted to still use it to create their own versions, which will not be supported by Adobe.

What do these changes actually mean for us? Currently, not a lot. Since bug fixes and security updates will still be released, those of us who have Flash on our mobile devices will be able to continue using it as before. The true change will happen when new devices come out without Flash support, but considering the most popular mobile device never supported it, the world will probably not change considerably.

What do you think about this move? Is this merely Adobe giving up, or are they making a wise choice?

Source: ZDnet

Now what happens when you need to look up one of those important pieces of information? Are you going to remember where it’s stored? Was it in an email, or a Facebook message? A tweet perhaps? Or maybe it was on your calendar, or in your Google Docs? If not, maybe you saved it in your Dropbox account. At any rate, it’s somewhere, and you need it now.

The quickest way to find this information you’ve misplaced would be to search all of the places I’ve mentioned at the same time, but is that even possible?

What Is Greplin?

Greplin (directory app) is a free service that lets you search all of your online data in one place. It eliminates the need to hunt down lost or forgotten information by giving you the ability to search files, messages, posts, contacts, events, and more from all of the services you like to use. It keeps everything where you need it, right on your mobile device for easy reference.

Basically, Greplin is a personal search engine that indexes all of the information you create on different websites, and it allows you to search for information all within the same screen.

Here is Greplin’s mission statement:

Our goal is to make Greplin the search bar for your life.

The free version of the app currently supports Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and LinkedIn. If you’re a typical user like me, the free version should be more than enough. You could say it covers all of the essentials.

If you really wanted to get fancy and subscribe to Greplin’s premium service (which is $4.99 per month), you would also get access to Google Apps (Mail, Calendar & Docs), Google Reader, Evernote, Salesforce, Yammer, Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, Delicious, and Tumblr. This appears to be more suitable for your business needs, at which point the monthly cost would probably be worth it.

Regardless of the option you choose, you can also access Greplin on the web, using the same account that you created for use on your iPhone. This may be helpful if you’d like a larger screen to peruse through information on.

Using Greplin

Once you’ve downloaded and installed Greplin to your iPhone, the process of linking your accounts and searching for information is pretty straightforward. The app separates services by category.

If you tap on one you would like to add, and it’s one of the free ones I’ve covered above, you simply need to enter your password for that service to add it to the list of networks Greplin searches whenever you enter in a query.

After you’ve added all of the services you’d ever want or need to search, you can visit the search area within the app and begin sifting through files at your leisure. Search results will be broken down easily for you by file or message type across your various networks.

Conclusion

I can think of dozens of instances where having an app like Greplin might be useful. Anytime you need to look up a phone number, address, old message, serial or confirmation number, or any other vital information you were messaged somewhere, Greplin can help you look it up on the fly, right from your phone.

Let us know what you think of Greplin or if you prefer a similar service (if there is one).

Dolphin supports tabs, bookmarks, and you can add favorite pages to the Speed Dial tiles, which are shown on every New Tab. While browsing with just the plain features is fine, there remains plenty of room for improvement. A variety of add-ons fill this space by offering cool extra features. This article covers five must have add-ons that will enrich your browsing experience with Dolphin.

Desktop Toggle

When browsing on a tablet, you will notice that many websites automatically load their mobile versions. While these page versions often load faster and are easier to browse, they may also lack features or impose screen size restrictions on you that are not necessary on a tablet. Desktop Toggle allows you to switch between the mobile and the desktop view of a website, granting you access to the best of both worlds.

To access the toggle button, swipe your browser window to the left, which will open the right-hand menu bar. Touch the button to switch between mobile and desktop version of the respective website.

Also have a look at my article How To Load the Desktop Version Of Websites On Your Google Android Honeycomb Tablet.

Tab Switcher

Per default, the Dolphin Browser switches to full screen mode when browsing websites. It provides temporary access to menus on the sides and tabs on top only by swiping them open. When you’re in the middle of a website and want to quickly switch to another tab, you have to scroll all the way up in order to view your open tabs. The Tab Switcher add-on solves this dilemma and makes it a lot more convenient to switch between tabs.

Click the right-hand menu button  (swipe browser window to the left) and switch to open tabs left and right via the respective bar. The green dots in each bar indicate the amount of tabs open on each side.

Speed Dial

Dolphin supports bookmarks and you can access them through the left-hand menu by swiping the browser window to the right. You can also add bookmark tiles to the ‘Speed Dial’ section shown when opening a new tab. The Speed Dials add-on adds some extra convenience for when you want to open a favorite bookmark into an open tab. You can access the Speed Dial menu through the right-hand sidebar.

Read Later

Read Later is Dolphin’s add-on for the popular Read it Later service, which we have covered in this article: Read It Later: Save Information To Be Read Later On Any Device.

After installing the add-on, the icon will sit in the right-hand menu. Sign in or create an account to start saving articles and webpages you want to read later. Once you want to park an article for later reading, click the icon in the sidebar. This will open your present reading list. Click > Save current URL in the bottom right to add the article you are viewing.

Tab History

This add-on, which is accessible through the right-hand menu, stores the history for each tab, allowing you to return to a previous website. Note that the information is tab-based and hence the history of the respective tab is lost when you close that tab.

If you are looking for an alternative to Dolphin, check out Miren – A Fantastic Free Browser For The Android Phone. Wondering What’s The Fastest Android Browser? Check out the respective Geeks Weigh In article.

What other add-ons are you using on your Dolphin Browser?

Anyone who has used the iOS version of Safari can clearly see its limitations – its lack of hand gesturing features, traditional tab windows, and no sidebar navigation – just to name a few. But the mobile technology developer company, MoboTab, has produced an iOS and Android web browser called Dolphin, with a few playful, smart features for browsing and launching websites.

Hand Gestures

The most unique feature of Dolphin is gesture navigation. With this browser you can navigate to a site by simply drawing a predefined letter or symbol. For example, you can draw the capital letter, “T” for Twitter or “G” for Google. You can of course add and edit symbols and corresponding addresses.

This feature saves you the trouble of having to type out URLs or open a bookmark panel in order to launch your favorite sites. However, the downside to this feature is that you must tap the Gesture button in order to draw a symbol. It would be better if you could simply tap anywhere on the screen and bring up the gesture window. Or to save an extra tap, perhaps holding your finger in one spot for a second and then drawing a symbol.

Unlike Safari, Dolphin also includes a three finger gesture navigation for revealing a Bookmarks panel on the left side, and a Tab Bar on the right. These two features alone make browser navigation easier and faster than reaching up and tapping the Bookmarks button, as you must do in Safari.

There are also drawing symbols for quickly navigating to the bottom or the top of a webpage; but again, it takes one too many taps to open the Gesture window and draw the symbols.

Other hand gestures include multi-touch zooming for enlarging text, and double tapping to zoom in and out on an area of the page.

Speed Dial & Webzine

Dolphin also has the now familiar Speed Dial feature found in most web browsers. However, MoboTab chose not to use small thumbnail webpage images for its Speed Dial. Instead he chose to do this for what it calls Webzines.

Webzines consist of hundreds of preselected websites including CNN Business, MSN Money, Fast Company, and various Yahoo sites. There are also categories of Webzine websites, such as entertainment, family and education, fashion, news, politics, Top Twitter, and travel.

Adding and tapping on a Webzine presents five sliding pages of preview articles, featuring the headlines and first paragraphs of articles for the selected site.

Interestingly when you tap open some pages in Webzine mode, you don’t get the full story. You mainly get what it’s on a single page, minus ads and other distracting content. Unfortunately, there is no way to navigate to the original page of a story in Webzine mode.

So it seems as though Webzines are mainly previews of some articles rather than the entire content of articles.

Sharing Features

The sharing features of Dolphin are limited to Facebook and Twitter. Webpages and stories can be shared from both Dolphin’s regular browser and Webzine mode content. You can also type in a short note before sharing. No doubt in forthcoming updates of Dolphin, users will be able to share articles via email, on Instapaper and other bookmarking services.

Other Features

Despite some limitations to Dolphin, the mobile web browser does include other useful features like Private Mode, bookmark importing from your default web browser, single page web searching, and the ability to clear all data storage including browsing history, cookies, and form data. You can also press and hold on links to open them in a new tab, copy them, and many other things.

Dolphin doesn’t quite outshine more advanced mobile web browsers like Atomic Web or Opera Mini, but its unique approach to hand gesturing has already garnished over nine million downloads of the application. Versions of Dolphin are optimized for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.

Let us know what you think of Dolphin. Is it already included in your folder alongside other third-party mobile web browsers? As for other web browser recommendations for the iPad, check out this article.

SkyDrive offers about 5 times more free storage than other popular online storage services (e.g. Dropbox and Box), and allows for easy photo album and file sharing. Perhaps the best part yet is that you can create and edit documents on the cloud with Office Web Apps, and even upload Office documents to SkyDrive from Windows Explorer via WebDAV.

SkyDrive doesn’t just serve as an online storage and sharing site. If you own a smartphone or Wi-fi enabled device, you could skip transferring files via USB cable and retrieve them from SkyDrive. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn’t released as of yet, official SkyDrive apps for either Android or iOS. There are, however, unofficial apps, such as the free Sorami for Android (which I’ve tried and works well) and the $4.99 iSMEStorage for iOS [iTunes link].

Here we’ll take a look at the mobile site that serves up Windows Live SkyDrive on Safari and any other browser on the iPhone.

Navigating The Mobile Windows Live Site

On your mobile browser, type live.com in the URL bar and hit Go. The site seems mostly optimized for the Hotmail service, so you’ll be directed to your Hotmail inbox at first. Tap the Menu option on the top right of the screen so you can see links for SkyDrive, among other Windows Live services.

Once you tap on SkyDrive, you’ll see all of your content, sorted by folders.

If you tap on any folders, you’ll be directed to a thumbnail view of that folder, much like you would expect.

If you long hold on any image you have in a SkyDrive folder, Safari doesn’t seem to be able to capture the image for saving. I had to try in a separate browser (Atomic Lite) to save the image.

For other types of files, including OneNote files, the mobile SkyDrive site compresses the files and provides zip files for download, most likely because there’s no mobile OneNote file viewer. Here’s a screenshot of my “Main” OneNote notebook.

For actual Office documents, you can easily view them on the mobile site, as well as download the original files, see thumbnails, navigate to a page in a multi-page document, see the text only, and more.

For other types of files, such as PDF, Safari Mobile will display the file, but you can also launch another app to display the same file.

That’s about all the features you’ll see in the mobile site. In my testing, loading skydrive.live.com gave me blank pages at least half a dozen times so if you end up experiencing the same thing, just try later or go back to live.com.

While I need to admit that it’d be a lot nicer if there were official apps on Android and iOS to access SkyDrive, right now the mobile site for SkyDrive serves its purpose. Still, let’s hope this article gets read and considered by Microsoft developers so we can actually use SkyDrive more seamlessly on our mobile phones with downloadable apps.

Do you wish Microsoft would come out with official apps for SkyDrive? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: eponas-deeway, Asher

A number of new features have been introduced including search, a new “file quick action” menu, share, delete, and account settings. All of these have been a part of the service for some time of course, but the mobile site redesign makes them more readily accessible on a smartphone or tablet.

Support for this new version of the mobile site is limited to the iPhone, Android 2.1+, and Windows Phone 7. In other words, most mobile devices should be compatible. Dropbox did not specifically state that Android Honeycomb is compatible, but judging from the design of the mobile site, those with 10-inch tablets would likely find the normal site a better choice.

You may be wondering why you’d use this instead of the app. If you’re using your own device, the app is likely a better choice. If for some reason you are not using your own mobile device, the website will be easier to access, and now offers functionality almost identical to the app.

Source: Dropbox Blog

Being restricted to the mobile version of a website can be annoying since they often lack features offered by their desktop version. If you would prefer to view the desktop version of websites on your Google Android Honeycomb tablet, you will be delighted to hear that there are two simple ways to achieve this. Read on to find out how you can toggle between the desktop and mobile versions on your Honeycomb tablet.

Change The Honeycomb Browser User Agent Setting

The Honeycomb browser’s user agent is set to ‘Android’, which most websites interpret as ‘smartphone’, thus displaying the compact version of their website. To change this, you need to change the respective user agent string.

• Open the native browser on your Android Honeycomb tablet.
• Type about:debug in the address / URL bar and press Enter.
• Don’t expect anything to happen; it will probably look like nothing happened.
• Next, open the browser’s settings via the icon in the top right corner.

• Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
• Switch to the Debug tab via the left-hand menu.
• On the right side now select UAString.
• Select Desktop.

• Click the Back button in the bottom left corner of the browser to exit settings.
• Repeat step 2 to exit debugging mode.

Note that the setting may be reset every time you reboot your device.

Interestingly, the browser on Android-based smartphones has a different user agent setting, which reads ‘Android Mobile’. This actually allows websites to differentiate between tablets and smartphones. Unfortunately, not all websites support the two different settings and surprisingly, this includes Google Mail.

Use A Different Browser

You may find that some mobile websites are actually more convenient than their desktop counterparts. In this case you probably don’t want to change the user agent setting since switching back and forth between different settings is quite a hassle. The alternative solution is to use a different browser which allows you to toggle easily between the desktop and mobile version of a website.

A browser I highly recommend is Dolphin Browser HD. To rapidly switch between the mobile and desktop versions of a website, you also need to install the Dolphin Desktop Toggle add-on. Once installed, you will find a toggle button in the right-hand menu of the browser. The right-hand menu opens when you attempt to slide the browser window to the left. Pressing the toggle button will load the respective other version of the website, if available.

Are you still undecided which tablet to get? There are at least 5 Things To Consider Before Buying A Tablet PC. Maybe you would like to Try Google’s Android Mobile OS on Your Computer with Live CD? And if you have made up your mind about getting an Android Tablet, be sure to review The 3 Best Android Tablets Available Today That A Buyer Should Check Out.

If you already own an Android device, have a look at these resources:

• Best Android Apps
• 10+ Tricks To Try With The Google Android Operating System
• 7 Of Google Android’s Little Annoyances & How To Fix Them
• How To Write Your First Google Android Application
• A Quick Guide To Developing Android Apps With Google App Inventor
• How To Install Google Android On A Windows Mobile Phone

Why did you get yourself an Android Tablet or why do you think you need one?

Image credits: Palto

One of my biggest problems with third-party browsers is that they offer some cool stuff, but none of it is cool enough to justify the hassle of switching. The feature set in the iPhone release of Dolphin is enough for me to switch. They packed more stuff into this small package than any browser on the App Store, even ones that cost money.

The gestures feature is probably the craziest. It is similar to unlocking an Android phone by drawing a certain symbol, but instead of unlocking your phone it opens a website. It’s a pretty slick idea that saves time from having to type in long URLs for websites you visit frequently.

They also have handy sidebars that are available with a quick swipe to the left and right on the screen. Dolphin also has a cool webzine feature that turns your favorite websites into a cleaner easier to read interface. For a full list of features, check out the developer website.

Dolphin is a great release, and one that I am happy to have on my iPhone. Check it out in the App Store.

Source: TUAW.com