Word dropped this morning that Torch Mobile, makers of the Iris Browser, had been purchased by Research in Motion. That's great news for BlackBerry fans, who have been in dire need of a browser for, well, ever. However, this is bad news for Windows Mobile. We just heard back from Torch Mobile spokesman George Staikos, and the response is unequivocal:

The company will no longer continue developing for Windows Mobile or Windows-CE.

Bad news, indeed, if you're set on using Webkit. The good news is that we still have a number of more-than-decent browsers available, including Skyfire, Opera Mobile and even Internet Explorer, which is slowly getting better. And we're still looking for the mobile version of Firefox in the coming months.

Via Crackberry and The iPhone Blog

It's browser day, apparently. This time, the venerable WEbkit-based Iris browser has gotten an update to v1.1.8. According to Torch Mobile's blog, here's what's addressed:

• Improved graphics performance
• Faster networking and loading of local files
• Improved memory usage
• Improved asynchronous behavior while loading pages
• Support for the W3C Geolocation API
• Support for HTML5 SQL databases and client side storage
• Rendering improvements, including for <canvas>
• CSS transformations and effects
• Improved Thai support
• Right-to-left language fixes
• Many general bug fixes

If you're new to Iris, we've plopped a demo video after the break. For everyone else, head on over to the download page.

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I've often expressed jealousy about the iPhone's web browser. It makes me green with envy and gives me a bad attitude overall - Think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Raphael on a bad day. After using mobile Safari, Pocket IE makes me want to drive a Sai into my screen. Green. Angry. Chip on my shell shoulder.

I digress. A lot.

The point is that Mobile Safari is based on WebKit, as are desktop versions of Safari (Mac and Windows), Linux's Konqueror (basically), Nokia's browsers, future Trolltech Linux Smartphones, and others. It's a great rendering engine and it's been proven to work well on mobile devices. Soon we'll be able to add another mobile device category to that list: Windows Mobile. Wake 3 is in the process of developing a WebKit-based browser for Windows Mobile.

The video below, besides offering some fun music (turn your speakers down, cube-dwellers), shows that the browser already works. It has a ton of promise - it just looks like they need to do some UI tweaking. First on my list would be making it more iPhone-like: add the tap-to-zoom feature (and make it smarter than Deepfish) and I'll pay you an unreasonable amount of money for this, Wake3.

WebKit is the world's best mobile web browser, used on Apple's iPhone and Nokia’s Series 60 handsets.  Now it runs on Windows Mobile--brought to you by Wake3. 

Read: Wake3 via WindowsForDevices