It's been a while since we've seen some new browser action on Windows Mobile handsets. But everything changed at the 2008 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, as three separate vendors  Opera, Skyfire Labs, and Torch Mobile  showed off slick new browsers, while a fourth  ACCESS  did a technology demo of their own browser.

It's been a while since we've seen some new browser action on Windows Mobile handsets. But everything changed at the 2008 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, as three separate vendors  Opera, Skyfire Labs, and Torch Mobile  showed off slick new browsers, while a fourth  ACCESS  did a technology demo of their own browser.

Torch Mobile showed off its Iris browser, which works on Windows Mobile devices and a handful of other embedded platforms. Billed as "small, fast, and user-friendly," Iris is a WebKit-based browser designed to work on not just Windows Mobile, but other cell phones, set-top boxes, portable media players, and UMPCs. Essentially, if you're building an embedded device, Torch Mobile has a browser they want to sell you (or at least start coding for you).

Iris supports HTML 4, parts of HTML 5, JavaScript, SSL, and CSS 2.x and 3.x, but not Flash. It includes tabbed browsing and a zoom functionall the rage in mobile browsers these daysand works with both touch screen and non-touch screen units. There's also a mouse cursor, which is something that Research in Motion finally added to their built in BlackBerry browser (the Pearl 8130 is the only handset to have it so far).

We installed a copy of Iris on a Sprint MOTO Q9c (which runs Windows Mobile 6 Standard) and were treated to a bare bones, flaky browsing experience. We doubled the zoom and entered full screen mode, only to find no way out; dropping to the home screen and re-entering the browser caused it to crash.

Interestingly, while it handed full-blown desktop sites just fine  our own Gearlog looked gorgeous in Iris, although scrolling was sluggish  it stumbled on WAP sites. It couldn't show any CNN.com pages properly, claiming a rendering error prevented it from displaying images on each one. A visit to wap.usatoday.com also failed to render images, and rendered the page too wide. So Iris still needs work. At least the zoom function did its job; unlike with Opera Mini or Symbian browsers, you just zoom in and zoom out right where you are; there's no box to move around first.

Meanwhile, ACCESS demoed NetFront Browser 3.5 for Windows Mobile Concept Version, a high-resolution browser for, strangely, older Windows Mobile 5.0 for Pocket PC devices like the Dell Axim x51v. The new version includes vague usability improvements such as improved stylus accuracy, "first-draw time" and zooming speed, but it's hard to get excited over something that doesn't run on current smartphones. (The company suspended general Windows Mobile development back with version 3.3.)

The new NetFront and Torch Mobile browsers join Opera Mobile 9.5, which product manager Bjarte Vosseteig showed us on the MWC show floor.

Opera Mobile 9.5 significantly pumps up the existing Opera Mobile 8.6 browser. You can now zoom in and out of Web pages, looking at a zoomed-out overview to decide what part of the page you want to focus on. Nokia's and Apple's mobile browsers already do this  not to mention Opera Mini 4.0, Opera's other handset browser  but not on Windows Mobile devices.

Opera's UI is sleeker, with attractive, gray menus and a full-screen mode where the menus disappear completely. If you click on an image in a Web page, you get various options to send or save the picture. You can open multiple tabs for Web pages. There's a password manager and a better URL auto-complete function, so you have to type as little as possible. You can save pages offline.

Most powerfully, though, Opera Mobile 9.5 supports Web widgets, which are little applications developed in AJAX and HTML that display various chunks of information, like sports scores or weather. Opera's widgets are similar to Google's, Yahoo's, Apple's and Windows Vista's on the desktop. All desktop Opera widgets will now run using the Opera Mobile engine on Windows Mobile devices, though Vosseteig said developers will want to re-code their widgets to support phones' smaller screens.

On the sample phone we saw, widgets were accessed using a separate icon - it didn't look like you were going into the browser.

Opera Mobile is still missing one major Web standard - Adobe Flash, which Skyfire supports (see below). Vosseteig said that Windows Mobile device manufacturers have been slow to port Flash Lite players to their devices, and that Opera could support them if they did. Opera is also exploring licensing Flash themselves to include it directly in the browser, he said.

Opera Mobile 9.5 will be available later this year, with a price around $24, Vosseteig said.

Finally, Skyfire Labs showed off Skyfire, which appears to live up to its billing as the most PC Web-like mobile browser. It supports a wide range of rich media content including dynamic Flash 9, AJAX, Java, audio, and streaming video including QuickTime  much of this one-ups even Safari on the iPhone. The browser also supports zooming, full-screen view, and multiple page thumbnails. The current version of Skyfire, in private beta, works on Windows Mobile handsets (5 and 6, touch screen and non-touch screen) at up to 320-by-320 pixel resolution. The company claims to have a Symbian S60 version in the works as well.