Here is how Google describes this feature: "Circles give you more control over how you manage your callers; for example, calls from your “Creepers” circle can be sent straight to Voicemail, only your “College Buddies” circle will hear you rap your voicemail greeting, or you can set your “Family” circle to only ring your mobile phone."

Depending on how you use Google+, this is indeed a really useful new feature, especially given that Google makes it very easy to set rules and even different voicemail greetings for every different caller.

Sadly, No Circles Interface in Google Voice

It's worth noting that this doesn't mean you can now drag and drop your contacts into different circles, though. Instead, this feature is actually a bit hidden in the Google Voice contacts settings (click on Contacts, then select a group, then click on Edit Google Voice Settings.

Chances are, if you follow a lot of people on Google+, just a few of these are likely to ever call you. This feature, then, is probably more interesting for those who are either very meticulous about how they organize their Google+ circles and those who use it as a very personal social network and less like Twitter or Facebook.

Android: Just for Booting and Drivers

The Android connection here is that Boot to Gecko will use the Android kernel and drivers to boot the device. Indeed, Shaver also notes that Mozilla aims to “use as little of Android as possible.” Given that quite a few device makers are already producing drivers for Android (and not necessarily for straightforward Linux implementations), using the lower-level Android layers makes sense for Mozilla.

Break “The Stranglehold of Proprietary Technologies Over the Mobile Device World”

The ultimate ideological goal behind the project, says Mozilla’s Andreas Gal, is to break “the stranglehold of proprietary technologies over the mobile device world.” That does seem like a mobile idea indeed.

Challenges

Here are some of the areas where Mozilla thinks extra work for getting this project going is still needed:

• New web APIs: build prototype APIs for exposing device and OS capabilities to content (Telephony, SMS, Camera, USB, Bluetooth, NFC, etc.)
• Privilege model: making sure that these new capabilities are safely exposed to pages and applications
• Booting: prototype a low-level substrate for an Android-compatible device;
• Applications: choose and port or build apps to prove out and prioritize the power of the system.

It will be interesting to see how developers will react to such a system, a ChromeOS-like “GeckoOS” that is actually popular could mean that developers could focus their energy on building just one application in HTML5 that would run on a large number of devices. As usual, though, this is an uphill fight, as device manufacturers would have to support this system to bring it into mainstream users’ hands.

Mozilla, as a non-profit organization, does have the ability to give these kinds of ideas a try to learn from them, whether they succeed or not.

The ‘Mini’ versions of Opera, which are also available for a wide variety of other operating systems, doesn’t actually render the sites on the mobile device. Instead, every website you request passes through Opera’s servers, is compressed and then sent to your phone or tablet. This makes it very fast, but in the first iPhone version, Opera was a bit too aggressive about how it compressed text and images.

With regards to features, Opera can hold its own with other third-part iOS browsers like Atomic Web and Perfect Browser. The browser does, for example, feature Facebook and Twitter sharing, full-screen view and support for bookmark syncing with Opera Link.

What’s missing, though, is the ability to switch the user agent so Opera Mini can identify itself as a desktop browser on the iPad.

As all other third-party iOS browsers, Opera also suffers from the fact that users can’t set it as the default browser. Even if you love Opera, the iPad will still open Safari when you click on a link in an email.