The wonderfully named Maximiliano Firtman, over at his Mobile Web Programming blog, has been testing Symbian Anna's web browser (on the new Nokia X7) and here reports positively on its speed and interface, but he also raises questions about the relative lack of HTML5 support, supposedly critical for a 2011 browser.

I can’t believe that a mobile browser released this year can be shipped without W3C Geolocation API support. It’s a basic API, a more mature standard than HTML5 and very simple to implement. So: Symbian Anna Browser does not support Geolocation.

In fact, it doesn’t support any HTML5 API apart from Canvas (2D drawing). Other great missing is video & audio support. You can still use Flash for video playing on Symbian browser, but video tag was a feature I was expecting for this release.

What is missing from the main HTML5 features available on other platforms:

• No Viewport support
• No Audio & Video tag support (the multimedia events seems to be there, but I couldn’t see a <video> tag working)
• No Application Cache / Offline storage mechanisms
• No Geolocation API
• No Accelerometer / Motion API
• No HTML5 new input types (even when Modernizr says ‘supported’, every input type uses the same text input with the same on-screen keyboard)

We can still access most of these features from the WRT widget platform (see Chapter 12). In fact, Symbian is one of the main platform supporting Home Screen widgets created entirely from HTML, CSS & JavaScript. But the lack of these features from the browser environment makes me feel strange about this new browser.

Read on in the full article. Personally, I'm still not convinced that making our phone browsers as capable as those on our desktop is necessarily the right way to go. Having web servers intelligently serve up content optimised for smaller screens and lower resource requirements seems a better way to go. Comments welcome, as always, though....