Well, its about time we saw some of the fruits of Blackberry’s acquisition of Torch Mobile, a fellow Canadian-based startup focused on mobile browsing.

Torch Mobile was famous first for bringing us Iris, the world’s first Windows Mobile browser to be based on the same open WebKit rendering engine that Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari are based on.
As we mentioned previously, Torch stopped updating its beta for Iris and disappeared one day, shortly after news was released of their purchase by RIM.
Blackberry’s current browser is long overdue for an upgrade… One of the more frequent complaints by Blackberry users is that it is the only “Smartphone” that doesn’t have a modern desktop browser. That is, web pages resemble the same simple rendering experience found on low end feature phones, as opposed to the desktop-experience styled browsers found on other handsets by Apple, Google, etc.
Therefore, acquiring a mobile web browsing startup like Torch Mobile was a smart, if not predictable move.

Well, here we are… about a half year later, and RIM is showing off their first desktop-style native browser (opera mini doesn’t count!). There is no mention of Torch Mobile, however they do say that it is webkit-based, which is a pretty good indication that we’re looking at Iris for Blackberry.

Check out the video below to see it in action. When this will be available is not yet known, however just knowing you’re getting a good browser should give any Blackberry fan the warm and fuzzies.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Blackberry Talk. 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.