Mobile browsing is seen as the promise (and sometimes bane) of mobile content…while Apple’s (NSDQ: AAPL) Safari browser garnered a lot of attention for its “new features”, it was pointed out that other browsers had those features quite a while before. Laptop has done a not-very-scientific test of 3 mobile browsers—the Apple Safari on a 3G iPhone, Opera 9.5.1 beta and Skyfire beta on an AT&T (NYSE: T) Tilt. The results show a significant difference between Skyfire (fastest) Safari (second fastest) and Opera (slowest). One of the big things to come out of it are all the disclaimers which need to be added, which show that which mobile browser you should (or can) use depends on which phone you have. For example, Safari is twice as fast as Opera, but you need an iPhone. Opera probably runs on the most number of handsets and has more features than Skyfire, but is slower…so how much do you want those extra features? As Gizmodo points out Skyfire is server assisted, so a fairer comparison would have been with Opera Mini which also preformats web pages on a server before sending to the handset. The upshot is that if you make a conscious decision as to which mobile browser to use, it’s going to depend on your handset and what sort of browsing you like to do, and the upshot of that is that the mobile browser market is likely to remain a lot more fragmented than the desktop browsing market.

A couple of new services are sending video to the iPhone, which has been hampered by a narrow choice of supported video formats. NBC is streaming episodes of 30 Rock and The Office to the iPhone over the WiFi network reports NYT quoting Silicon Alley Insider. Orb has also launched a native client for the iPhone and iPod Touch, letting users stream video from their PC reports The Register. Orbs client works over the 2.75G Edge network.

The important thing is that these methods bypass Apple’s (NSDQ: AAPL) store, which was pointed out by J. B. Perrette, the president of digital distribution for NBC Universal: “One other benefit of streaming is that it can reach users of a device like the iPhone without having to cut deals with the phone’s maker. Web video, he said, “is only using the hardware as an access point to the content.” The same goes for the data channel.

Apple and America Movil announced they have signed a deal to bring the iPhone to more than a dozen Latin American countries. The carrier said it plans to offer Apple’s handset across all of its Latin American operations starting later this year, but didn’t give any other details of the arrangement.

Apple also recently announced deals to offer its only handset with Rogers Communications in Canada; Telecom Italia in Italy; and Vodafone Group in 10 countries, including Australia, India, Italy and Turkey. Based on its report for the quarter ending March 31, Apple has sold 5.4 million iPhones worldwide so far; the company stands firm with its goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of this year.