14 DAY TRIAL // In less than two years, users will have their mobile phones shipped with built-in browsers, designed mainly for that specific phone. According to Google's mobile engineering director, Ann Mei Chang, "Within a year, you'll see all manufacturers have full browsing, at least on the high-end phones. This is a turning point for the industry."
Most of today's mobile phones don't have a built-in mobile browser, which is also known by the term of micro browser or mini browser. Users have to manually install browser applications similar to Opera Mini or Opera Mobile. Mini browsers allow mobile phone users to fully benefit from their mobile phone's Internet capability, enabling access to data, somewhat similar to their PC counterparts. At the moment, a number of important companies have already released mobile browsers.
Google has recently announced its plans of breaking onto the mobile phone market, by introducing Android, which is said to be the first complete, open and free mobile platform. The SDK has been developed to provide users with all the tools required to run Android applications including a true device emulator and advanced debugging tools. The Android platform is expected to be shipped with a web browser based on the open source Webkit platform, which is also the basis for Apple's Safari.
Ann Mei Chang also stated that Apple's iPhone "is paving the way, but the whole industry is moving to full browsers". She also added that Google's optimization for the iPhone has been created by a single engineer within a couple of months. According to the Mountain View company, the future is to move to full browsers, a move that will ease the creation of web-based apps.
Chang was also set on claiming that a mobile version of Google Gears will enable the company to build even more sophisticated web applications. Google Gears is an open source project, available for all of the major operating systems, that enhances the web experience for offline environments.