Many web pages would load up a heck of a lot faster on the iPhone's Mobile Safari browser if you weren't stuck waiting for "LOWER YOUR INTEREST RATES NOW" and the like to push through on Mobile Safari. If you've jailbroken your iPhone or iPod touch, however, there's a none-too-hard hack you can make to block a good number of ads from slowing down your page loads. Here's the step-by-step instructions for doing so:

Read More »

Vodafone has dropped the price of its entry-level mobile broadband plan, cutting its 1G a month offering from $34.95 to $24.95. (It advertises the service as $19.95 a month, but you have to pay $5 a month for the USB stick modem.) The plan still requires a 24-month contract, so it's not ideal for super-ideal users, but it doesn't have the trick conditions of most prepaid mobile broadband plans.

Photo sharing site Flickr just activated an iPhone-scaled version of the site for anyone visiting the site with a mobile Safari browser. The menus are optimised to put the most-accessed activities—photo stream browsing, "Explore" mode, and recent comment activity—right up front, and your upload-by-email address is placed in the "More" section. Best of all, Flickr's site pre-loads many of the iPhone-scaled thumbnails you're checking out, so flipping between pictures often doesn't require any kind of refresh. No slideshows for now, given the lack of Flash on the iPhone, but the site's a nice alternative to pinching and pulling gigantic photos on the standard site.

You might think that Australian Idol is the worst thing to happen to the local music scene since Joe Dolce, but its producers are trying out an interesting experiment: free ad-supported video content for mobile users. Idol enthusiasts will be able to catch up on weekly performances, recaps and an exclusive video blog via the service. While there have been plenty of shows that have flogged online access for a fee (including Idol itself in previous years), this represents the first time that video content has been made available cost-free from a current TV project that I can think of. Of course, as with most phone content, it helps to read the fine print. Vodafone is sponsoring the initiative, so while Vodafone subscribers get the whole lot for nothing, Telstra, Optus and 3 users are still up for data charges -- and as we all know, all-you-can-eat plans don't exist in this sector. Even so, it does represent a slight shift from the walled garden/wounded bull charging model that has predominated in the past. Would you be more tempted to watch mobile TV if it was free, even with ads in it? Send us your thoughts in the comments.

According to Sensis' latest e-Business Report, just 10% of Australians have a phone with email access incorporated. (Whether that's because the data plans for them are so expensive is another matter.) Those of us who do have them seem to like them: six out of ten mobile email users never switch their device off, while roughly a fifth of us de-activate them at weekends to get some proper downtime. Doubtless these figures will be used at some point in the near future to argue that the BlackBerry has turned us all into work slaves -- though, as Gina argued recently, such discussions never point out the productivity gains that can come with better access to work resources.

Social networking site Moko, originally developed for mobile phones, has now launched a full-blown PC version of its site. While the primary emphasis appears to be on romantic hookups, there's also general chat rooms and picture sharing. Moko is free to sign up and use on the Web version; charges for mobile use vary depending on your mobile network and plan. [Moko]

Windows Mobile only: The newly-released Opera Mobile 9.5 beta offers a host of features for surfing on your handheld device. The browser operates in full-screen mode to maximize the amount of web site you see without cluttering things up with toolbars. Restore access to the toolbars by tapping small silver arrow in the lower corner of the screen. Opera Mobile also has support for full-screen browsing similar to Microsoft's experimental browser Deepfish. You can look at the entire page at one time and choose which area you want to zoom in on for closer examination. The full page browsing is handy for manoeuvring around web sites that aren't mobile phone-optimised, instead of playing the scrolling game to figure out if you can find what you're looking for. Opera Mobile 9.5 beta is a free download for Windows Mobile only.

Read More »

If you liked what you saw in the screenshot tour of Opera and were impressed by its performance in our speed tests, you can now grab Opera 9.5 USB to run from your thumb drive. [via]

Read More »

3's latest mobile broadband offering, the prosaically named Broadband Internet Key, is pretty much a standard 3G modem but adds one really useful feature: no cable. Plugging directly into a USB port means you can effectively use the Internet on the go (think trains) without stuff dangling in the wrong place. The pricing is nice ($15 for 1GB a month on a 24-month plan) and the device works on both Windows and Macs (and Linux, though it isn't officially supported). There's only one major catch . . .

Read More »

Visiting New York and wondering whether a crosstown cab is any faster than the subway? Mobile|Traffic, a free web service for mobile phones (and standard browsers as well) offers updates from more than 4,600 traffic cameras in seven countries, including the U.S., U.K., and Australia. Simply navigate from country to state/province to city, and you'll get a recent shot of the intersection. Using Mobile|Traffic from a phone requires a data plan, as you'd imagine, and, as MakeUseOf points out, it's in serious need of map and search functions. But it's simple, free, and pretty useful if you don't always trust vague traffic reports of "moving steadily" and the like.

Read More »