Q:

Why does google.com look different on blackberry & phonegap vs. blackberry & browser

I'm tyring to get phonegap up and running on blackberry storm (9530 simulator).  I had been testing my webapp from withing BB's built in browser, and it was looking ok, but then it totally bit once I tried to look at the some code from within phonegap, even though I was pointing phonegap to the same url (I hadn't yet gotten to the point of running code locally on the device).
I tried a test case on google and got similiar results.  see below.  I suspect that I'm missing something basic here.  I would have expect both images to be nearly identical.
Browser
http://www.eleganttechnologies.com/outside/ImgDeviceBB9530WebGoogle.jpg
Phonegap
http://www.eleganttechnologies.com/outside/ImgDeviceBB9530PgGoogle.jpg
[Update]
To shed some light on what is happening, I ran the browser and the embedded browser (phonegap) against the W3 mobile web acid test: http://www.w3.org/2008/06/mobile-test/
I definitely notice differences between the two, but I don't yet know the 'why' and the 'how-to-address'.
Acid via built-in browser

(source: eleganttechnologies.com)
BTW - I ran this earlier today and got a couple more green square than just now.
Acid via browser embedded into phonegap
http://www.eleganttechnologies.com/outside/ImgDeviceBb9530PgAcid.jpg

A:

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about phonegap, but have a pretty good theory.  By default the embedded browser control on BlackBerry uses an older version of the rendering engine than the BlackBerry browser itself does. 
At the BlackBerry developer conference last year, a talk was given about this, and there's an undocumented option to use the newer rendering engine.  \
The option ID is 17000 (yes, a magic number, which could change, use at your own risk etc), and should be set to true.  Not sure how you'd pass this option through phonegap (I'm not familiar with the toolkit) but using the BlackBerry APIs it's something like:
BrowserContent content;
...
content.getRenderingOptions().setProperty(RenderingOptions.CORE_OPTIONS_GUID, 17000, true);

