TeaShark Beta with the Tabs drawer open

It goes without saying that we heart Opera Mini. It generally goes unchallenged as browser of choice; the only browsing experience that can compete (mobile Safari) is only available on the iPhone/iPod Touch, so Opera Mini rules the J2ME world. Being the only good, solid product on a platform has its downsides, though: Without any competition, the drive to progress and innovate is dampened.

Fortunately, that may be about to change. TeaShark, a new free J2ME browser, has come along to light a fire under Opera Mini’s pants, Aiming to bridge the gap between the mobile and desktop browsing experience, it sports many of Opera Mini’s most notable features (Full HTML browsing, Zoom navigation, RSS feeds, etc) while bringing a number of features over from the desktop browser world, including: Tabs (Whoo!), Highlight based searching (Highlight a word, hit 1, and you can search for the phrase on a few different search engines), and a really crafty address completion feature.

TeaShark is currently in beta, and is still very much a work in progress. The tabbing system is a bit broken, QWERTY input isn’t mapping properly (See bottom of post for help with QWERTY.), and things are generally just a bit off at the moment - but it’s an outstanding start, and will certainly make the free mobile browsing market a lot more interesting.

You can send TeaShark to your Helio over at myHelioApps (High fives to djayc for his outstanding work on that site, and emgator for uploading the package).

Play with it a bit, then shoot a message over to info@teashark.com to show’em some love and to let’em know how great it’d be to see improved support for Helio devices.

Update: Turns out, QWERTY can be mapped properly! Hit the Left softkey, go to Tools -> Preferences, and check “Use phone’s editor”. This hinders the usefulness of the awesome address completion system, but allows for proper QWERTY input. (Thanks for the tip, djayc!)

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 2:41 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.