ReadWriteWeb

There are some undercurrents swiftly moving through developments circles that will soon become the topic everybody will be discussing. Among those topics, one significantly stands out in the mobile realm - the coming wave of HTML5 Web-based apps. The vanguard is being led by mobile games developers but the rest of ecosystem is not far behind. Facebook's so-called "Project Spartan" is the carrot that has spurred app developers but the ability to disrupt the application store model is high on developers' minds.

In talks with developers last week, the common refrain was "I do not have anything to say about Project Spartan." But app developers know that Project Spartan is coming - they are working with Facebook and soon the Web will see the benefits of their labors. The responses were not "I do not know if it is true or not, I have no idea." Rather they were "I cannot talk about that." The social games developers are leading the way of a trend that could be extremely disruptive to the native app economy.

Opera announced today that its browsers are now used by more than 100 million people worldwide, saying that the distribution between mobile and desktop users is a nearly even split at 50 million a piece.

While 50 million desktop users means just a tiny fraction of the browser market for home users, 50 million mobile users actually represents a dominance in the mobile browser market.

At the time of this writing, it's been just over two hours, 21 minutes and 14 seconds since Opera submitted Opera Mini to Apple for inclusion in the iTunes App Store.

How do we know this? Opera is putting Apple's notoriously slow response time and browser monopoly on center stage today as part of its announcement that it is coming to the iPhone.

There's good reason tweets are limited to 140 characters - the microblogging social network was developed specifically with mobile in mind and 140 characters is the size limit for a text message. With that in mind, it's no surprise that Twitter has experienced a 347% jump since a year ago in people accessing the site via mobile browser.

Thanks to mobile developer Nathan Freitas and the teams behind Tor and the Guardian Project, secure and anonymous mobile browsing is on its way.

On his blog, Freitas writes, "We have successfully ported the native C Tor app to Android and built an Android application bundle that installs, runs and provides the glue needed to make it useful to end users.... secure, anonymous access to the web via Tor on Android is now a reality."

Recently, researchers at the Nielsen Norman Group put the mobile web to the test in a usability study that looked at twenty different web sites on six different types of handsets. The results? The mobile web still leaves a lot to be desired. It's so bad, in fact, that principal researcher Jakob Nielsen, co-author of the study, compared today's mobile web to the web sites of the early 90's.

But is the mobile web really to blame here for the usability issues? Or is this just a matter of people trying to surf a web that has evolved beyond what traditional cell phones and their awful built-in browsers can handle?

Last week, Google announced a change in how software can run on Android, the company's mobile operating system which powers such devices as T-Mobile's G1 and the upcoming MyTouch 3G. Instead of just allowing Java applications that run on Google's Dalvik virtual machine, Android will now allow software that runs natively in on the Linux operating system itself. This will be made possible through a new toolset for developers, the Android Native Development Kit. The change may allow Mozilla to bring their young mobile browser, Fennec (aka "Firefox Mobile") to the Android platform.

Apple has always had a tendency to hype up its statements about the speed of its devices by using just the right benchmarks and just the right products to compare them to. When it comes to the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 3.0 update, however, it looks like Apple might actually have understated some of the speed gains it advertised. Medialets, a mobile advertising and analytics company, ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark on the iPhone 3G with the old and new OS versions, as well as on the 3GS. In Medialets' tests, the speed of the iPhone 3G with the 3.0 almost tripled, and the new iPhone 3GS is another 3 times faster in completing the SunSpider benchmark than the 3G with the 3.0 release.