On every platform it runs on, Opera Mini’s signature feature is that it’s speedy, thanks to server-side compression that crunches Web pages down before they get sent to the browser. In my extremely informal experiments here at SXSW, Mini didn’t feel particularly zippy. (Actually, it loaded the New York Times’ home page more slowly than Mobile Safari did.) But it may not have been a real-world test of how it’ll perform when Apple approves it (please!) and it shows up on the App Store: An Opera representative told me that the compression is still going on via servers in far-away Norway, which would tend to bog things down.

Whatever its performance turns out to be like, Opera Mini has some features that might lead some folks to opt for it over Safari, at least on a part-time basis. It’s got Opera’s Speed Dial feature, which lets you get to favorite Web sites with one tap. It uses Opera Link to synchronize bookmarks with other copies of Opera on different devices.  It lets you search for text within the current page, a pretty basic feature which Safari lacks.

On the other hand, Mini doesn’t try to match the desktop-like accuracy with which Safari renders Web pages: It just displays a rough approximation (albeit an acceptable one, at least on the pages I visited). And I don’t think it offers Safari’s ability to play YouTube videos.

Once Opera submits Mini for approval, Apple’s response will be one of the bigger litmus tests in iPhone history to date. Apple has been known to reject apps on the grounds that they duplicate existing iPhone functionality or might confuse users. But iPhone owners deserve to be treated like grownups who are smart enough to try multiple browsers before settling on one if they so choose. Just as they get to do on Android and just about every other platform, mobile or otherwise.

By submitting Opera Mini, Opera will be doing iPhone owners a favor. Heck, it’ll even do Apple a favor, by giving it a golden opportunity to do the right thing.

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On Tuesday the company announced FileMaker Pro 11, an upgrade whose major new features are so logical that I was startled in some cases to realize that the software didn’t already have them:

• FileMaker now has a built-in charting engine that lets you create slick-looking bar, line, area, and pie charts based on information from your database, then embed them in records. It’s pretty easy to use; I’d like it even better if it gave you a what-you-see-is-what-you-get preview with real data as you tweak your chart.
• The program’s spreadsheet-like Table View has been beefed up a lot: It’s now easy to group records for reporting purposes, hide fields, and add fields and data without switching views.
• A jumbo-sized, floating Inspector palette lets you click on an item in Layout Mode to see all the aspects you can control, such as position and alignment.
• The Quick Find search field in the upper right-hand corner–similar to OS X’s Spotlight and the search in iTunes–lets you quickly do searches in the current layout.
• You can now organize layouts into folders.
• By using Recurring Import, you can set up a database to automatically import an external file such as an Excel worksheet every time you open the database. It’s handy if you use FileMaker to navigate your way around data created and update in another application. You can’t, however, make changes to records and then save them back into the original file, making the feature useful for viewing of external information but not editing.
• Snapshot Link lets you capture a query result, then share it with other Filemaker users as a static lists of records that shows what you got at a particular point in time.

As before, FileMaker packs lots of power into a user interface that’s much friendlier than Microsoft’s still-gnarly Access 2007. Starter Solutions” provide templates for a variety of applications, from businessy ones (asset management) to personal productivity (a task list) to the purely personal (a database for organizing your music). Bento’s approachable enough to make it a good choice for serious home users as well as corporate types, but I wish that the company would bring its even more approachable (and much cheaper) Mac database Bento to Windows users. (It wouldn’t be a cakewalk, since the Mac version ties itself heavily into Mac-specific stuff like iPhoto’s photo library–but I don’t know of any Windows apps that are even Bento-esque.)

FileMaker Pro 11 is $299 for the full version or $179 as an upgrade; FileMaker Pro 11 Advanced, which adds more features aimed at professional database developers, is $499 or $299 as an upgrade. It’s available now, and there are free trial versions at the FileMaker site. A few screens after the jump.

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Now the Sprint Pre has been joined by the Pre Plus, which runs on Verizon Wireless and began shipping in January. After I recently said I was flirting with abandoning my AT&T iPhone, Palm offered to loan me a Plus for review. Here’s my take, following up on the story I did on the original Sprint Pre back in June. Executive summary: the Pre Plus isn’t a radically different phone from its predecessor, but it’s still a really good one–and while the WebOS third-party application situation pales in comparison to the iPhone, it’s better than I expected judged on the number of available apps alone.

(Note: Over the weekend, Palm pushed out WebOS 1.4, an OS upgrade that enables video capture and which supports Adobe’s Flash Player. However, it’s n0t yet available for Verizon’s WebOS phones, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, and I haven’t tried it.)

The Hardware

Most next-generation smartphones are decidedly iPhone-esque–they look like the iPhone with a slide-out keyboard, or like the iPhone with a trackball. Or they just look like the iPhone, period. Physically, the Pre Plus  is a near-twin of the Pre, and it continues to offer a choice, not an echo. At 2.3″ by 3.9″ by .67″, it’s strikingly smaller and more phonelike than the slablike iPhone. It fits well in the hand–it’s a great one-handed phone which you can navigate entirely with your thumb if you choose–and slips easily into pockets.

A smaller phone means a smaller screen: The Pre Plus retains the Pre’s 3.1″ display, vs. the iPhone’s much more expansive 3.5″ one. But at 320 by 480, the more petite screen has the same resolution as the iPhone, giving it the same pixel density as the higher-resolution Verizon Droid. Photos and type look gorgeous.

In general, both the built-in Palm apps and third-party ones do a good job of scaling their interfaces to the Pre’s undersized display; it rarely feels cramped. The only time I pined for something larger was when I was read blogs, news stories, and other wordy Web pages. For those, I opted for the Plus’s landscape mode. And I don’t think I’d want to use the phone for truly heavy-duty consumption of text, such as reading e-books–which is one reason why I’m not grief-stricken that there’s no Kindle app for WebOS.

The Plus’s physical changes compared to the first Pre are all minor: The home button on the phone’s front has been replaced by a glowing virtual slit, the keyboard has been tweaked (with a firmer feel and new monochrome look), and the sliding mechanism, which some criticized as flimsy, is more solid. The phone also comes with a back that’s compatible with Palm’s nifty Touchstone charging station as standard equipment; with the original Pre, it was an extra-cost option.

Its keyboard is…okay. Using it still feels a bit like jabbing at Jelly Bellies, and the phone’s narrow width makes two-thumbed typing slower going than with a BlackBerry. I’m not going to argue that it’s inherently superior to the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard. But I like it much better than the Verizon Droid’s wider, flatter keyboard. And I still think that one unappreciated virtue of physical keyboards is the way they free up all of a phone’s pixels for other stuff. When you compose an e-mail on an iPhone, the on-screen keyboard leaves a tiny window for your text; on the Pre Plus, the whole display is available.

Inside the phone, Palm has doubled the RAM (to 512MB) and the storage memory (to 16GB). I found that the Plus’s performance felt similar to that of the first Pre: pretty zippy overall except when loading a program into memory, which is surprisingly slow at several seconds per app. The increased RAM should help the Plus multitask more apps without bogging down; the more generous storage is a plus if you plan to load the phone up with music, movies, and/or podcasts.

I didn’t attempt to measure the Pre Plus’s battery life, but I did notice that I had to use it somewhat cautiously to get through a full day on one charge. Palm quotes the talk time as up to 5.5 hours and standby as 350 minutes (both the original Pre and the iPhone 3GS claim up to 5 hours of talk time and 300 minutes of standby).

The Software

Palm’s operating system, WebOS, is still pretty much the same one that the company unveiled in January of 2009. Which is a compliment, not a criticism: In terms of ingenuity, elegance, and efficiency, it remains the only mobile operating system that truly rivals Apple’s iPhone OS.

Actually, in multiple ways WebOS feels like a hybrid of the most appealing aspects of iPhone OS and Google’s Android, without their downsides. Like the iPhone, it looks beautiful, offers full multi-touch support, and lets you navigate around mostly through intuitive gestures. (Most Android devices still don’t do multi-touch, and the OS is burdened with too many buttons, menus, and inconsistent ways of accomplishing tasks.) Like Android, it multitasks–but with the ingenious Card interface that makes it a snap to bop between apps:

WebOS’s Synergy feature, which melds contact and calendar information from Outlook, Google, Facebook, and other sources, isn’t quite as unique as it once was–Android 2.0 has cribbed some aspects of it, such as integration of Facebook friends into its contact database. But it’s still the richest expression of the idea. (For instance, Android’s version lacks Synergy’s LinkedIn integration.) And it helps to make the Pre Plus especially appealing if you’re buying a phone primarily as a tool to help you whip through busy workdays as efficiently as possible. So does WebOS’s to-do list–for some reason, iPhone OS and Android still don’t come with task management as a standard feature.

The one major new feature in the Pre Plus that really is a new feature rather than a tweak or hardware upgrade is Mobile Hotspot. It’s a twist on tethering that turns the Pre Plus into a pocketable Wi-Fi router, much like Novatel’s MiFi. The feature costs an extra $40 a month for 5GB of data–twenty bucks less than you’d pay for access via a MiFi or USB modem–and is a cakewalk to use. Once you’ve set a password, you just turn Mobile Hotspot on, then connect to it from your laptop as you would to any Wi-Fi hotspot. (It supports connections from up to five simultaneous devices.)

Mobile Hotspot isn’t going to replace a separate EVDO modem for everybody. In my tests, it was slower than a USB-stick Verizon modem, giving me a connection that ran at slightly under 400-kbps vs. 500-kbps for the stick. Verizon’s CDMA network won’t let you use the hotspot and talk on the phone at the same time: If you take a call, the Internet connection cuts out until you’re done. And the feature guzzles battery power (a Palm representative suggested to me that it makes sense to keep the Pre Plus connected to a laptop via USB cable during hotspot sessions).

If AT&T ever gets its act together and lets iPhone owners simultaneous talk and tether their laptops, Mobile Hotspot may seem limited by comparison. For now, though, it’s a reason for iPhone types to be (mildly) jealous of Pre Plus owners.

One area where no iPhone user will envy Pre Plus owners is entertainment features. WebOS still offers a basic music player and video player, plus on-device access to Amazon’s MP3 store. But this is still a phone that focuses on productivity with a dash of fun, not a media-centric device like the iPhone. And now that Palm’s quixotic attempt to make WebOS devices sync directly with iTunes seems to be over, the OS could also use a media-syncing app for Windows and OS X. (I used the free DoubleTwist to transfer music, video, and podcasts; it worked just fine.)

Oh, and for what it’s worth: The Pre Plus performed well as a phone in my tests. Voice quality was consistently very good, and I didn’t experience any dropped calls.

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How does it perform? Well, Seth Weintraub of Computerworld and 9 to 5 Mac used the SunSpider test to put it through its paces, and found that it beat Safari and Chrome, the fastest OS X browsers in terms of JavaScript.

Zippy JavaScript performance doesn’t automatically translate into a browser that feels zippy. Judging from the time I’ve spent with Opera 10.50 today, though, it does indeed feel like an unusually fast browser in ways that earlier versions of Opera didn’t. (It also feels like a beta–it crashed on me while I was posting this articles–and so I’d suggest trying it as a complement to your main browser rather than a substitute.)

One of the things I like about the the Windows version is its Chromelike minimalist interface, which compresses all of Opera’s options into a single menu. Like Chrome, Opera isn’t so sleek on OS X–it’s got eight menus, plus the Apple menu and the Opera one. That’s at least in part because one of the most fundamental differences between the Windows and Mac interfaces is that OS X has a fixed menu bar at the top. If you start to remove menus from it, it doesn’t conserve space and leaves the bar looking a little naked.

Google Analytics tells me that 98.5 percent of Technologizer community members aren’t using Opera. On both OS X and Windows, I’m excited about 10.50’s potential to be the first version of Opera in a long while that tempts users of other browsers to switch allegiences.

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From Facebook to MySpace to Twitter to LinkedIn and beyond, the Web circa early 2010 is a surging sea of social networks. The last thing it needs is yet another one to discover, join, and use. Especially since any social network is only interesting if the people you care about are also active members.

But what if someone took the Internet’s original social network — the pals, family members, coworkers and acquaintances in your e-mail address book — and turned it into a Twitterlike way to quickly share your whereabouts, thoughts, links, photos, and more, either publicly or privately?

Enter Google Buzz, which the Web behemoth rolled out last week. Rather than starting out as an all-new service, Buzz is debuting as a feature inside Gmail, making it instantly available to tens of millions of people. Gmail users get a link right under their inbox, letting them post to Buzz and peruse others’ activity right from within Gmail’s familiar environs. Interacting with people you’re already in touch with via e-mail is especially easy.

It’s a powerful idea. In fact, as Google discovered when Buzz came under instant attack as a threat to Gmail users’ privacy, it might be too powerful.

What’s good about Buzz is downright terrific. Unlike Twitter, it imposes no 140-character limit to get in the way of expressing yourself. Like Facebook’s Wall, if you paste a link to another Web site into a post, Buzz adds a summary to your post, complete with images. The photo-sharing feature, which works with images you upload directly into Buzz as well as Flickr and Picasa albums, is stupendously slick and simple. And you can make any post public or restrict it to a group of people you specify — “Family Members,” say, or “College Buddies.”
Buzz is also available on wireless phones: Apple’s iPhone and models that uses Google’s Android software at first, with more to come. This mobile version, which resembles services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, uses your phone’s GPS and Google Maps’ mammoth database of local businesses to figure out where you are. That makes it a snap to share opinions about restaurants, stores, and other establishments.

Here’s where things got controversial. Google thought it would do new Buzz users a favor by helping them find other Buzz users to follow, so the service would be instantly useful. It did so by automatically making newbies followers of the people they contacted most via Gmail and the Google Talk chat service.

Handy, right? Sure — but in Buzz, your list of followers is public unless you choose to conceal it, or don’t create a public Google Profile at all. That wasn’t entirely clear. And Google didn’t anticipate that some people might be sensitive about a list of their closest Gmail confidantes being openly available. The most striking real-world example: One blogger with an abusive ex-husband realized that her former spouse could use Buzz to identify who she was in contact with.

In many cases, however, having information about your Gmail activity become public was no big whoop. My only gripe about the initial list that Buzz created for me was that it wasn’t very relevant: It consisted mostly of business contacts who I had no particular desire to keep tabs on. Oh, and my mom. If she so much as touches Buzz, I’ll eat my keyboard.

The alarm over Buzz’s autofollowing feature seemed to take Google by surprise. (It had tested the new service mostly by using it internally, not by letting a small group of Gmail users try it out.) To its credit, the company moved swiftly. Two days after it unveiled Buzz, it tweaked it to make it easier to hide the list of people you were following. It also permitted users to block any person from following their activity on Buzz.

When that didn’t calm everyone down, Google went further by terminating the autofollowing process altogether. Instead, it now suggests people from your Gmail contact list: You can follow all of them, none of them, or pick and choose. The company also patched up some other potential privacy leaks, such as Buzz’s auto-publishing of users’ Picasa and Google Reader activity. (It had only been publishing items that were themselves public, but it turned out that some folks didn’t like Buzz connecting the dots between multiple Google Services.)

Even without any security leaks, Buzz feels like a rough draft. When an old post gets new comments, it rises to the top of your list — which sounds logical, but leaves you reading popular posts over and over. It uses a yellow stripe to highlight new comments, but it’s so subtle that it’s easy to miss. The service also puts Buzz discussions it thinks you’ll want to read directly in your Gmail inbox, but gives them cryptic subject lines. Bottom line: It’s often tougher to find interesting stuff than it should be.

And although you can tell Buzz to automatically grab and republish your 140-character Twitter tidbits, it does so at an amazingly sluggish pace. One item I posted on Twitter took nine hours to make its way over.

Like I say, though, there’s much that’s already nifty about Buzz. I hope that its bumpy start doesn’t permanently damage its reputation, and that Google continues to refine it at the same rapid clip it’s established so far. I’m having fun Buzzing at www.google.com/profiles/harrymccracken — stop by and say hi if you’re so inclined.

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LinkedIn for Outlook brings everyone you’re connected to on LinkedIn into Outlook in the form of a contact list that auto-updates itself as folks change their information on LinkedIn. Outlook’s new People Pane lets you view info about people (and their LinkedIn photo) as you view e-mail from them. It’s all very handy, and it instantly increases the value of LinkedIn (a service I’ve belonged to for years without benefitting much). It’s especially nifty when you don’t know a LinkedIn contact very well and could use a refresher on just who he or she is.

LinkedIn for Outlook and the whole idea of bringing social-network contacts into Outlook are promising, but getting the beta version to work is weirdly and needlessly complex. Some people who installed it–such as my friend Sam Diaz–found that Outlook crashed after installing LinkedIn. By the time I tried this evening, Microsoft had updated its blog post, explaining that users of the beta version of Outlook 2010 needed to uninstall the version of the Social Connector that came with the Office 2010 beta and install a new update before installing LinkedIn.  (The Social Connector and LinkedIn also work in Office 2003 and Office 2007.)

The download page at LinkedIn’s site still doesn’t mention this gotcha. In fact, it seems to say that Office 2010 users don’t need the Social Connector at all. And both the LinkedIn download page and the installation program are vague about exactly how to use LinkedIn once it’s installed within Outlook. A quick tutorial would help a lot.

Come to think of it, I’m foggy on why Outlook users need to worry about a separate piece of software called the Social Connector at all, and why the LinkedIn functionality can’t be added from within Outlook itself. Of course, Outlook, the Social Connector, and LinkedIn for Outlook are all still in beta. Maybe by the time Office 2010 ships this summer, all of this will be a lot closer to seamless.

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How much do I love Google? Thanks to the stats provided by Google Web History, it’s easy to quantify: Over the past four and a half years, I’ve Googled for information 43,295 times. That works out to about one search per hour, 24/7/365. If that doesn’t indicate passion for the world’s most popular search engine, I don’t know what does.

But I’d never argue that Google is always the fastest, most effective way to find facts, seek advice, take actions, or simply satisfy your curiosity about the world around you. Actually, there are more viable Google alternatives than ever. For the most part, they don’t compete by trying to out-Google Google at basic Web searching. Instead, they do useful things that Google doesn’t.

I’m nowhere near as dependent on any of these five free services as I am on Google — but I use and recommend them all.

When Microsoft relaunched its blah Windows Live search engine as Bing last year, it didn’t just give it a different name and a fresh coat of paint. The new version is Google’s most formidable competitor for general-purpose Web searching, with numerous nice touches — for instance, you get playable previews of videos right in search results.

Microsoft smartly chose to put extra effort into a few key areas, such as its travel section, which is uncannily similar to the excellent Kayak.com. You can enter dates and locations for plane tickets or hotel stays, then get a grid of results that you can further refine — to direct flights only, for instance, or to hotels with swimming pools. It’ll even tell you whether you’re likely to save money if you postpone making a reservation a while longer.

Aardvark is a free service (located at Vark.com) whose members serve as a panel of experts on an array of topics. You can ask questions via e-mail or your favorite instant-messaging service; Aardvark relays them to people who it thinks may know about the subject, then collects their answers and delivers them back to you.

It works well when you’d rather get quick advice from a few real knowledgeable people than scour Google results for relevant links on a question such as “Should I buy a mountain bike, a road bike, or a hybrid to ride around San Francisco?” When you belong to Aardvark, it gives you the chance to play expert too, by sending you questions from other users on matters you’re interested in.

Wolfram|Alpha calls itself a “computational knowledge engine,” but I think of it as a 21st-century equivalent of a thick, fact-packed paperback almanac. It’s a vast repository of knowledge skewing towards the mathematical and scientific that you can explore by entering questions.

For purely factual, objective, simple questions such as “What’s the wind chill in Barcelona?,” “How old was Theodore Roosevelt when he died?,” and “What was the population of the U.S. in 1970?,” there’s nothing better. It also knows the calories in a Big Mac (805). And it’ll even tell me the chances that I’ll win California’s MegaMillions lottery if I enter (1 in 175,711,536).

If you already use Twitter, you know that one of the best things about theridiculously trendy social network site is the bevy of links that members share to news stories and other interesting stuff. But you don’t need to be a Twitter maniac to use it to find worthwhile links on timely topics. In fact, you don’t even need to have a Twitter account.

You’ll find a Google-like search engine at search.twitter.com that returns 140-character “tweets” from Twitter members, often containing links to articles around the Web. (I used it Monday morning to find interesting tidbits relating to Sunday’s Super Bowl commercials.) It’s a good way to dip your toe into the Twitter stream without getting overwhelmed or making a commitment.

Siri, which debuted last week, is surely the first iPhone app that’s the commercialized result of a multimillion-dollar Defense Department research project. It’s a “virtual personal assistant” that uses voice recognition, your GPS location, and links to local information and services to respond to requests you speak into an iPhone 3GS.

You can ask Siri to call you a taxi, or to reserve a table at the best nearby sushi joint, or to tell you who’s playing at a local concert venue. The voice-recognition part works just about perfectly. And it all feels like a sneak preview of how we’ll get and use information in the future, even though I’m occasionally disappointed by the results (Siri occasionally recommends local businesses based on skimpy data.)

Got any other Google alternatives that you find essential? Leave a comment and let us know about them

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The new version lets you open word-processing documents and spreadsheets stored in Google Docs’ online repository, edit them, and save them back to Google Docs. And it lets you do the same for files saved at online-storage services Box.net and Dropbox. (Quickoffice already had similar support for Apple’s MobileMe service.) These cloud-based storage features are particularly useful given that Apple still doesn’t enable office suites like Quickoffice to open file attachments. (The suite does offer a workaround that requires you to forward attachments to a special address.)

I told Quickoffice my Google Docs login credentials, and it let me see all the documents I’ve created and stored there:

Medium-sized nitpick: Google Docs itself shows the files you’ve edited most recently first, and allows you to search for documents, so it’s generally very easy to find documents even if you haven’t organized them in folders. (Which I haven’t.) Quickoffice, however, lists everything in alphabetical order. You’ll be able to find your documents, but it might take more scrolling around to hunt them down.

This new version of Quickoffice requires you to sign up for an account with the company which it uses to help manage file conversions. It’s a quick process, but some customers are squawking about it in reviews at the iTunes App Store. Maybe the Quickoffice folks could help minimize unhappiness by making it clearer what they will and won’t do with your information when you sign up.

Quickoffice continues to compete with Dataviz’s mobile office suite Documents to Go–and in a perfect world, there’d be one suite that had all the best features of both products. Documents to Go has a presentation app–Quickoffice only does word processing and spreadsheets, though presentations are in the works–and built-in access to file attachments in Microsoft Exchange and Gmail accounts. But it doesn’t have Quickoffice’s useful new cloud-storage features.

Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite is a very reasonable $9.99. There’s also a $7.99 version without the new cloud features, and Quickoffice Connect, a free app that lets view and share files stored in the cloud services, but not edit them. They’re all available now at the App Store.

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Opera’s makers are calling version 10.50 “the fastest browser on earth,” apparently based on the performance of its new JavaScript engine, which the company says is eight times faster than the old one. (The previous engine performed poorly compared to other browsers in the SunSpider benchmark test.) Judging browser speed based largely on JavaScript doesn’t make a lot of sense, but all of Opera’s competitors except Microsoft do it, too.  (It may not be a complete coincidence that IE is the other browser besides Opera that lags in the SunSpider test.)

I’ve only used Opera 10.5 a little bit so far–and some of that has been via iffy EVDO (I’m at Macworld 2010 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center…which is one enormous basement.) So far, it feels snappy. WebMonkey seems to agree.

If you want still more speed, you can turn on the Turbo mode, which compresses graphics on the server side so they download more quickly. Opera recommends it only for use when you have low-quality bandwidth–such as in the basement of a big convention center, for instance–but it could come in handy in such circumstances.

Opera 10.50’s emphasis on zippy JavaScript is at least partially a response to Google Chome–and there are a few other new features that are also distinctly Chrome-esque. Versions of Opera prior to 10.0 had a busy, crowded interface that 10.0 went a long way towards cleaning up. And 10.50 introduces a much sleeker default look that opens up more room for the Web site you’re on by doing away with standard menus:

Okay, it hasn’t done away entirely with menus–it’s really collapsed everything onto one button in the upper  left-hand corner. It’s reminiscent of Microsoft’s Office 2010 interface, except there’s no “Ribbon” to take up space. So far, I like it. (You can opt to go back to standard menus if you choose.)

Opera 10.50 also finally introduces a private browsing mode, much like Google’s Incongnito (and the similar features in IE, Firefox, and Safari):

And like Chrome and Firefox, Opera has rolled the functionality of its search bar into the address bar itself, so you can enter either URLs or search terms–which leaves me wondering why it’s also retained the now-redundant search bar.

Opera still has a bunch of unique features, including applike widgets, a neat tab view that shows thumbnails of pages, and the controversial-but-interesting built-in Unite Web server. In terms of market share, it’s the smallest of the major browser players by far: only about 1.35 percent of Technologizer visitors run it. But 10.50 looks like a strong upgrade–there’s more that I like in it than there was in 10.0, come to think of it. If you check it out, I’d love to know your thoughts.

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It took a little longer than the company thought, but a beta version of RealPlayer SP for OS X is available for download now–Real gave me a sneak peek last week–and is largely similar to the Windows version. A utility runs in the background and watches as you view videos at YouTube, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, and others that offer DRM-free content. As in RealPlayer 11, SP’s predecessor, you can download video files to your Mac for later playback in Real itself. But now you can also transfer them to forty-plus gadgets with a couple of clicks. RealPlayer chooses a format and settings, does the conversion, and even places the resulting video in the proper location for syncing when possible. For instance, it dumps video destined for an iPod or iPhone into iTunes, so it’s transferred the next time you sync.

If you don’t like RealPlayer’s defaults or own a gizmo that’s not in its list, you can tweak the conversion settings yourself (including using an option to create audio-only files from videos you’ve downloaded). You can also convert videos in batches, and even created more than one file–say, a high-res one to watch on your Mac, and a low-res one for your phone. In short, it offers as much stuff aimed at conversion nerds as it does for folks who just want to watch Web video on a variety of devices. And it does a nice job of concealing the complexity unless you want it.

Beyond the new video conversion features, RealPlayer SP’s other major addition is a social sharing option: When you come across a video online that you want to tell your pals about, you can post a link to it via Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace. The standard text includes a plug for RealPlayer, but you can delete it if you choose.

RealPlayer SP for Windows comes in both a free version and a $40 one with more H.264 video support and built-in DVD burning. Mac users just get the freebie edition, which includes unlimited H.264 but doesn’t burn DVDs. (You can, however, prep video for OS X’s own DVD-burning feature.) The Windows version also bundles Google Chrome into the installer, making you opt out if you don’t want it or already have it. But the Mac installer didn’t  try to install anything else or otherwise pitch me on anything related or unrelated to the software, and didn’t install any adware on my system.

I did encounter a couple of (minor) glitches with the beta–most notably that it failed to convert one video until I tried a second time. Overall, though RealPlayer SP is an extremely simple way to accomplish a task that formerly took multiple pieces of software and, sometimes, a bit of technical knowledge. It’s what I’ll use from now on when I’m snagging video from the Web via my Mac to watch on my iPhone.

A few screenshots of the software in action:

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