Welcome to 2010, AOL. The internet giant turned media giant turned hopeful contender for hearts and minds has relaunched their mobile website, and thankfully left behind the relic of dumbphone past known as WAP. Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP, was meant to deliver online media (well, mostly text and some pictures) efficiently to older phones with their poor browsers and limited bandwidth. In this era of advanced WebKit browsers like those found in webOS, iOS, and Android, as well as the advent of speedy 3G tech, WAP just doesn’t cut it anymore.

AOL has seen the light and rebuilt their mobile site to deliver better HTML-based content goodness. Like Yahoo!, AOL has been busy retooling themselves as an information and media portal, and the new mobile version of the site easily shoehorns that portal to millions of smartphones across the world. AOL also released new apps for iOS and Android, but a webOS app was nowhere in sight. Of course, it’s still AOL, but it’s not the mailing-more-than-a-billion-CDs-to-your-house AOL of years past. Worth a shot? Check it out at m.aol.com.

Source: AOL Mobile

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Want to use Google Buzz from your webOS phone, but don’t feel like installing the iPhone User Agent patch to trick the internet into believing that you’re using an iPhone? You’re in luck, as Google has decided to give you the option to use Buzz regardless of your mobile platform of choice. Pre and Pixi owners that visit buzz.google.com are now greeted with a page explaining what Google considers to be compatible platforms (Android 2.0+ and iPhone OS 3.0+), but also giving the option to continue on using your unsupported device. After several minutes of poking around, everything seems to work flawlessly on webOS, which is little surprise as it uses a WebKit browser just like iPhone OS and Android.

Thanks to Mohan for the tip!

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There is this test call the Acid3 Test, and it is designed to test a web browser’s compliance with web standards, with an emphasis placed on Document Object Model and JavaScript. For an operating system based on web standards, you might think that webOS would have been scoring fairly highly with the test from day one. Not so, it would seem. In the early days of webOS, the browser scored a pitiful 1/100. With the update to webOS 1.3.1, the browser scored a 73/100 – better, but still not great.

Now, with webOS 1.4 out and about, the browser’s standards compliance has taken another step forward, scoring a 92/100. Obviously, that’s a great step forward as far as the browser is concerned, and we have been receiving reports of better performance and rendering on all manner of sites as a result. The score also vaults the webOS browser (seriously, it needs a name) to the upper tier of mobile browser compliance, topped only by Mobile Safari (100/100), Opera Mini (98/100), Firefox on Maemo (94/100), and Android’s browser (93/100). Of note, Safari and Android are both powered by the same WebKit core that hums underneath the webOS browser (and webOS as an OS), so full standards compliance is a possibility. At the very least, the score is worlds better than before and far ahead of Internet Explorer (Mobile: 5/100, Desktop: 32/100). For 99.999999% of users a score of 92/100 is going to be more than good enough for their browsing experience.

jack87 in our forums also notes that several sites (like costco.com) that previously failed out on webOS are now working. How about you, seeing better rendering now that you’re all 1.4′d up?

EDIT: Anchors (links that lead to a specific point on a page, e.g. comments) work now too! This blogger = happy camper.

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While there is a plethora of webOS Twitter clients to choose from, if none of those are to your liking there’s always the Twitter website. Right now, the mobile Twitter page – m.twitter.com – is a bit lacking in its functionality, especially for high-powered mobile browsers like those on the iPhone, Android, and webOS platforms.

Realizing the power of these mobile WebKit browsers, Twitter has been working on an enhanced mobile portal. The recently launched preview site – mobile.twitter.com – leverages the power of the browsers while also delivering a cleaner more polished Twitter experience than the current mobile site. The new mobile site is still a work in progress (search doesn’t appear to be fully functional at this time), but once it is complete it will transition over to take the place of the current mobile portal.

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It’s a sobering fact that in this day and age we are no longer in control of our data. From our emails in the cloud to the way we use apps on our webOS phones, there are many corporate heads with their eyes on monetizing our personal data. What we don’t look at often, however, is how the government wants to utilize that data.

If you’ve ever watched any of the various crime dramas on television today, you know that a favorite method for locating a criminal is by tracking the GPS chip in their phones. While we know that’s a reality in our world, what we didn’t know until recently was how much that data was actually being used. Sprint, with its 43 million subscribers, was revealed through the work of an Indiana University graduate student to have given law enforcement the GPS data of their customers eight million times in the span of 13 months. The ‘service’ has proven so popular with the authorities that Sprint has set up an automated online portal for accessing subscriber GPS information, for a nominal fee of course.

UPDATE: Sprint has issued the following statement [via: Phone Scoop] regarding the disclosure of subscriber GPS data, as we expected 8 million requests does not equal 8 million users.

Sprint says that the "8 million" figure represents the total number of times its network was pinged for GPS data. Those millions of bits of data, however, represent information from only a few thousand customer accounts. A single investigation can account for thousands of pings to Sprint’s networks. A Sprint spokesperson noted that law enforcement and other government agencies only request information such as in missing persons cases, genuine emergencies, criminal investigations, or instances when a customer consents to sharing information. Sprint spokesperson Matt Sullivan said, "In all cases we require a valid legal request appropriate for the circumstances, meaning the request must be accompanied by either a subpoena, court order or customer consent." Sprint is not alone in this practice. All wireless carriers share customer information with law enforcement agencies when the need is mandated.

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If there’s one thing to like about online services like Google, it’s that they can update their stuff whenever they want. Google has a penchant for making small but useful updates to their mobile search portal, and yesterday your searches for movies just got better. While we do have Flixster and Fandango available now on our webOS phones, there’s something to be said for the innate elegant simplicity of doing the Google.

Google recently updated their movie search options for mobile search, at least for those lucky enough to be using phones with WebKit browser (i.e. iPhone, Android, and webOS). A search for “Movies” on Google will yield a link to a “More movies” option that opens the new movie search page. From here Google throws together a map of nearby theaters and movies playing on their silvery screens (browsers with geolocation abilities, i.e. Safari on the iPhone, actually use GPS to locate nearby theaters).

In addition to just offering your local playtimes, clicking on a movie will bring up a page with movie summary, map to nearby theaters, more showtimes, cast info, and even images from the film. Throughout all these pages is a “Play trailer” link that pulls the trailer straight from YouTube so that you can watch it right on your phone. The only thing that’s missing? A way to buy tickets for your selected flick, but that’s probably because Google hasn’t yet bought somebody that does that.

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Our sister site, The iPhone blog, recently posted about Google’s new Wave technology and how it worked wonderfully as a WebApp for the iPhone.  Having recently set up my Wave account, one of the first things I did was to see how well it worked through Palm’s own WebKit based browser, hoping that a mobile page would be delivered when I visited the site. The result?

Not good as evidenced by the "Memory critical, too many cards!" dialog in the screenshot to the right.  I was served the desktop version, and attempting to load the desktop version caused the Pre’s browser to grind to an absolute crawl, which is to be expected of any smartphone currently on the market.

I suspect that a page optimized for the Pre’s browser is coming down the pipe sooner than later, but for those who can’t wait to get their mobile Wave on, there’s a solution: the Pre’s browser (using webOS Quick Install from our homebrew section) can be patched to have it report itself as Mobile Safari to any web server, which means you get the very same mobile page that’s delivered to the iPhone delivered to the Pre.

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Quirksmode measured the CSS and JavaScript compatibility of 19 different WebKit based browsers.  The conclusion?  All 10 mobile WebKits the study’s author has identified are subtly or wildly different, meaning there’s no singular "WebKit on Mobile".  Quirksmode sums that thought up, saying "This is not consistency; it’s thinly veiled chaos."

Indeed. So how does Palm’s WebKit-based browser compare to the others?

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Less than a week ago we discussed how perfect WebGL would be for the WebOS.  Aside from the similar names they’re both built around web standards.  Well the stars must be aligning, because WebGL is back in the news, with a common connection to the WebOS: the WebKit core.

For those unfamiliar, WebKit is the opensource engine that renders all the WebOS apps and is what makes the website formatting on the Pre look so good. And while WebKit also powers many of the major web browsers out there (include the Android and iPhone browsers), the WebOS is virtually centered around it, so when news like this surfaces, we should pay some attention.

It appears Wolfire’s blog has discovered traces of the WebGL in the WebKit, in the form of a 3D canvas element.  The results of initial layout tests can be shown in the above video, and is pretty impressive, all things considered.

The more I think about it, the more I believe Palm would be fools to not integrate WebGL into the WebOS.  It’s such a perfect combo and it seems the WebGL component could be delivered to Palm via future WebKit builds anyway.  It’s not unreasonable to believe Palm could adapt OpenGL for the WebOS Linux core, and leave the WebGL as frontend for developers.  That fits Palm’s WebOS persona of hiding the Linux core and leaving the open web standards for developers.

WebGL isn’t even in the in nightly builds yet, so if you want to try it out, you’ll need to compile it freshly from the source.  It’ll certainly be a while yet before it gets integrated in any browsers for the public, but once its out there, it would be incredible:

In the same way Gmail is killing desktop mail applications, full-fledged 3d video games could start migrating to the web.

Or in our case, possibly migrating to the WebOS.  I sincerely hope Palm integrates WebGL.  This new web standard is progressing fast, as if they don’t act, you just know others will. Plus I’d really love to see the kind of OS-wide effects such advancements could have with added 3D functionality.

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The big question (one of them) surrounding the Palm Pre is just how good is the browser? We know it’s based off the same open-source WebKit engine as the iPhone’s Safari browser, but the robustness of its features has been up in the air for, well, five months now. Thanks to Darth Pooh in our forums and his magical Pre access, we can note that the Pre’s browser is fairly robust, as it can handle both Google Docs (spreadsheet) and Reader, as seen above. They are the iPhone versions of the sites, but that’s not a bad thing by any measure.

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