Phone Fun

I now have a total of four browsers on my phone.

For some reason it comes with two built in, one for general web browsing, and one for my phone company's online content, though this can also navigate to other sites.

The "Vodafone Live" browser is fairly basic, though it seems to work quite well for sites that are designed for mobile access. Regular websites can get a bit jumbled up. The problem is that this is the default browser, and there doesn't seem to be a way to cchange the default. This means that clicking a link in a website will always open this browser, which can be a little awkward.

The second browser is just called "Web" on the phone. Apparently it's a branch off the same source as Safari. It does generally render pages very nicely. However, this can make navigarion a little fiddely and causes a lot of left-right scrolling on the small mobile screen. It has a nice zoom out feature that lets you look at a shrunken view of the page then choose where to zoom in to. It features a little mouse cursor, which works well, but can be a bit fiddley to navigate.

I downloaded Opera Mobile, which you have to pay for, but I'm enjoying my 30 day free trial. It does a good job of rearranging the page to fit the screen. This can make it very long, but gets rid of the side to side scrolling. So far I like it a lot. For pages that don't render well, you can switch back to normal rendering mode. It also has a zoom function. One thing I like is the way it let's you open pages in a new window. The built in browser can open windows if a link requests it, but doesn't offer any way of explicitly doing so. This annoys me as I like to have a few windows open and switch between them.

However, yesterday I discovered Opera Mini, which has a slightly different mix of features. It defaults to a full page with zoom mode, but can switch to a small screen rendering mode. It's shortcuts also seem to work better on the E61i keyboard.

I shall have to do some road testing to see which I like best, though no doubt I'll end up wanting some features from each of them.

Another erosion of our civil liberties

This week it was announced that from 2009 it will no longer be possible to travel between Ireland and the UK without a passport, and that we will have an electronic border with a requirement to submit personal information prior ro travel.

While it may be claimed that this is to prevent terrorism, we all know that it's really about controling the movement of illegal imigrants.

Personally I'm not terribly happy about this. In the past I have travelled to the UK with no identification whatsoever. Probably not advisable, but in the past one had the right to.

However, if I lived in Northern Ireland I would be absolutely livid. This effectively makes residents of the provence second clss citizens of the UK, as they will no longer be able to travel within their own country without carrying a passport and submitting personal details about themselves.

I feel that we are heading the wrong direction with this. We should be looking at a wider European common travel arrangement. As far as I know, France, Germany and the Benelux countries still have a common travel policy. We should be looking at merging it with the UK and Ireland one, and gradually bringing in other EU countries. We should be looking at making it easier to travel within the EU, not at erecting new barriers. If necessary, strengthen the external controls, but once within the EU movement should have as few restrictions as possible.

How do you think the Texans would react if you told them they'd need a passpord to go to New Mexico?

Not very well, I think, and why should we be any different?