UCWEB for iPhone now in English - why wait for Opera?

One of today´s big news is that Opera has submited their Opera Mini browser to the iPhone Appstore. However, there is alot of doubt about Apple letting this go. Will iPhone users be forever limited to Safari and it´s clones has browsing options? Not really, because yesterday something was released on Cydia that pretty much does the same has Opera Mini, the UCWEB browser!

Some of you might remember me mentioning UCWEB has the only non-webkit based browser for iPhone, back in September. Problem was, it had several limitations, namely being totally in chinese, and suffering from the Great Firewall of China censorship.

Well, this new version is perfectly translated to english, and it´s proxy based compression seems not to be affected by any chinese censorship. Choose the zoom mode, and you have a full alternative to Safari, much faster and much less data intensive, perfect for people with limited data plans and/or situations with slow data connections (gprs/edge)

To install it, please add http://wap.uc.cn/en to your Cydia repos.

Opera Mobile 10 coming to Android

And it looks awesome!

UCWEB - the only non-webkit based browser for iphone

Just 2 days ago, Opera Mini 5 beta was released, and the general consensus is that it improves an already awesome product. Among other features, what makes OM special it´s the speed, something that is result of it using a proxy server to compress web pages before sending it to the phone. This is specially useful for people with limited data plans (i´m one of them), because it uses much less data than "full" browsers (like safari), and for slow 3G or evem slower GPRS/EDGE connections.

I tested OM 5 and was left thinking how good it would be to have such an alternative to safari on the iPhone. Well, i remembered there is something - UCWEB, a browser that rivals OM on the java space, and uses the same kind of proxy technology. Better, it has an iPhone version (jailbreak required, of course), that i used on the OS 2.x days. Even better, it now has an OS 3.x compatible version.



Of course, the main limitation is obvious - it´s in chinese! Nevertheless, i can tell you it´s even easyier now to use it without understanding a bit of the language, because there´s now alot of self-explanatory icons.

To test it, add http://wap.ucweb.com/iphone/cydia to your cydia sources, and start saving some data and gaining speed when not using Wifi or HSDPA connections.