E. J. Bantz

A couple weeks ago my friend Scott told me about Palringo.

At first I thought this was just another boring Instant Messenger app that consolidates all of the IM services into one.  But then I noticed they have a version for PC, Mac, iPhone, Windows Mobile and realized it was a bit different than the others.

I tried Palringo for a couple days and soon realized how powerful it is and now I use it as my primary IM tool.

Here is what I love about it:

• Facebook chat on my phone
• GPS location of my friends
• Push to Talk
• Photos

While I was eating dinner today I decided to download Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta for my HTC Advantage phone.

http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/download/

So far I am very impressed.

Scrolling down on a page is very fast and easy.  You just give the page a push with your finger like you do on the iPhone. 

The navigation buttons are very large and are easy to tap with a finger.  There is no need to use a stylus.

Pages render very quickly.

You can have multiple pages open and switching between them is simple and fast.

The text is very large and screen and easy to read.  That was actually the main reason why I was looking for a different browser.  I was finding IE and Opera 8.5 a bit too small hard to read.  This version is much better.

We’ll see how it goes over the next couple weeks and see if I switch back to Internet Explorer.