One thing I like about BlackBerry is that it suddenly changed it gears when iPhone made its entry in to the smartphone turf and others sonn followed it. BlackBerry seems determined to improved it offerings no mateer what against the increasigly strong competition. In what seems to be a crucial development, BlackBerry has acquired Torch Mobile which is the parent company of Iris mobile web browser.

Iris uses an open source webkit rendering engine for mobile browsing which is the same engine that both iPhone, Palm Pre and the Android devices use. It can’t be denied that both Android and the iPhone offers much better browsing experience than BlackBerry. BlackBerry is indeed playing smart in making this acquisition. BlackBerry may also include the Flash and Silverlight in its mobile devices by 2010. Iris offers advanced HTML, CSS support along with customizable interfaces, touch screen control and pop-up blockers.

Iris is currently available for Windows mobile devices and you can see how it renders the web pages against the iPhone’s browser in the image above.

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