The Fennec Fox is “a small nocturnal fox found in the Sahara Desert of North Africa which has distinctive very large ears” according to the mighty Wikipedia. However the Fennec I refer to is of course the mobile version of Mozilla Firefox, currently optimised for touch screens with a beta version out primarily for the Nokia Internet tablets (The newer ones of course, they don’t appear to like my Nokia 770 anymore – put to the back of the cupboard me thinks). There is also a PC version available to test which I have installed on my OQO.
Fennec in itself runs pretty smoothly, I’m sure with a final build it’ll be even smoother with bugs fixed and usability issues sorted. But it’s the interface that I’m impressed with, its something akin to the iPhone browser. To get to your tabs you drag the page you’re reading to the right which displays a visual list of tabs along the left hand side – showing screen caps of the tabs you have open and the ability to add a new tab.
For navigational controls you pull the page you are reading to the left which displays the bookmarks button, back and forward buttons on the right. At the top of course is the address bar and ‘add to bookmarks’ button.
Its intuitive and all but it’s not without its faults. I’ve found that on both Gmail and Google Reader it just doesn’t sort the pages out right – I can’t scroll to the bottom of my list of mail due to the page scrolling instead of just the list, and I can’t scroll through Reader items as it scrolls the whole page rather than just the reading section.
I’m looking forward to future versions of the software which are built properly for xp etc. I’m thinking they will be a good competitor to put on mobile devices. The prospects of having firefox on my n95 is also a good thought.
If you want to try out Fennec go here

Ok ok, I’m sorry, I know! – its bad of me to be late again in my duties but I’m settling into a new lifestyle here!

I shall tell the tale of a new gadget in the household of geek, Last week whilst away on business (that’s right – check me out going away on business!) my phone (e65) decided that it didn’t want to let anyone else hear my voice and the microphone stopped working, the day after it still wasn’t working but then decided in the evening to revive itself and come back to life, however after that I thought that I couldn’t really trust it as a microphone is a rather vital part of a mobile phone in emergencies.

Therefore I purchased a Nokia N95 8gb which is a bit of a large expenditure I agree but I’d like to be safe in the knowledge that my phone works but also I loved the gadgety goodness of the phone – the accelerometer in it is awesome with the availability of so many applications that make the most of it – the LightSabre app which does what it says on the tin, Moving ball app which is just a ball that moves depending on the rotation of the device and Waterbox which just simulates water when the phone is moved – all very simple yet fun applications which add to the novelty of the phone.

I’ve found it so much faster to use than my e65, writing messages, going to the phone book and so on is just much better on it – and it can handle more applications running at the same time due to more ram and also the way it handles the applications to make sure that there is always ram available.

I’m looking forward to the ‘bysamir’ and ‘Aikonlab’ websites being available again soon hopefully as at the moment they’re offline or being modified and have a goldmine of great applications so I’m sure I’ll update you on those soon.