New Platforms and Features Added to Magento Mobile

iPad and Android Join the Magento Mobile Family

Magento Mobile native application support for Android and iPad are now available. With support for mobile web and native applications, merchants are positioned to take advantage of mobile growth from either channel with an intuitive user experience that dynamically adjusts the look and feel according to the specific device capabilities. Many merchants continue to extend their brand into Mobile, engaging with customers in new ways and learning even more about their customers purchase habits.

This latest release of Magento Mobile is packed with some great features and integration with other technologies. The latest releases of Enterprise, Professional and Community have the mobile administrator pre-integrated making it simple to manage the mobile application without the need for a separate extension.

Push Notification Service with Urban Airship

The Magento Mobile iPhone offering is pre-integrated with push notification service from Urban Airship. This product enables merchants to increase the engagement level they have with their customers by providing them with timely product updates, sales promotions and other targeted marketing. Once a merchant signs up for the Urban Airship service, Magento provides the tools necessary to create and distribute messages using the service.

Magento Payment Bridge Supported on Magento Mobile

Magento Mobile is integrated with the Magento Payment Bridge to manage transactions with your payment gateway and simplify PCI compliance.

Mobile Marketing Goes Social

Magento Mobile supports sharing product information with all common social media including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Consumers using a Magento Mobile store application can share information about their favorite online stores with friends using their social networks.

Zooming In with Magento Mobile

Image zooming capabilities are now even better with Magento Mobile. The server side supports bigger images and provides dynamic image resizing according to the device resolution. Clients can further zoom in on product details and get the information they need to make a decision.

www.magentocommerce.com/products/mobile

Firefox 4 for Mobile Enters Beta

Enhanced speed, responsiveness, and stability come to Mozilla's Fennec platform.

The Mozilla Project announced the release of Firefox 4 beta 1 for Maemo and Android. Significant improvements in the performance and responsiveness of the mobile browser are two of the most instantly noticeable changes in beta 1. Especially when pinching to zoom, moving around a webpage, and rendering zoomed images.

This is because of Electrolysis and Layers, a pair of optimization tools that Mozilla is banking on to supercharge Fennec for these platforms. Electrolysis made its first appearance in the Fennec alpha and in the desktop version of Firefox, beginning with 3.6.4. Users can thank Electrolysis for protecting against browser crashes when a plugin fails because it splits processes across multiple processors, allowing for the components of Firefox to be addressed independently. In Fennec, Electrolysis works in a similar, but scaled down way, by separating the browser interface and rendering process to run independently from one another.

Layers allows for hardware accelerated rendering on mobile devices and it removes the canvas-tile-cache rendering typically used when panning and zooming in a mobile browser (for a great example of this, see Opera Mini). Layers can instead use XUL elements. For even more detail on Layers and Electrolysis, check out Mozilla member Mark Finkle's blog.

Hardware compatibility is another major issue in the Fennec browser. Mozilla says that Fennec supports ARMv7 features such as Thumb-2 and NEON, but that running the app on low-end Android phones and specifically, Samsung's build of the OS isn't advisable -- at least until the Samsung 2.2 image is available. Instead, the programmers are focusing more on high-end smartphones, as they see the devices as being the industry norm by this time next year.

Personally, I've been playing with the app on a Motorola Droid 2, which is a reasonably powerful Android phone with a 1 Ghz OMAP processor and the factory version of the OS installed and despite multiple attempts at reinstalling Fennec beta 1, I cannot get the browser to recognize input from the slide-out keyboard and I cannot raise the touchscreen keypad. This was an issue with the alpha I tested as well. However, the app tested fine, if not a little unresponsive on Rikki Kite's stock HTC Incredible, which is similar in specs to a Droid 2.