Symbian in Motion

Apparently some people were a bit confused by my last post entitled The S60 Browser Just Doesn’t Cut it Anymore. Despite my post-publishing addition, several people thought that my qualm was with a particular site that continuously caused the S60 Browser to crash. To clarify, it’s not.

My qualm is the fact that the S60 Browser does not keep up with internet technology. Of course, it’s “just” a mobile browser so I would never expect it to be able to handle cutting edge elements and overly complex code. Websites built on technologies that have been popular for five years or more however, should be accommodated. This is my opinion. Nokia / S60 innovated by bringing “the real web” to the mobile phone masses, this is true. The problem is they left too much of it behind. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I visit several site each week that don’t work properly in the S60 Browser; sites that really should work.

So just now, I picked another site. I thought to myself, “Ok. I want to try a popular site, also built on Drupal, that doesn’t do anything too fancy.” The first site that popped in my head was NowPublic. Here are the results:

What’s my point? My point is that this should be a huge focus right now for S60. In case you haven’t noticed, the web is big business. People spend more time on the internet now than ever before and a new popular web service seems to pop up every 15 seconds. It’s staggering! The S60 Browser on the other hand, now supports Flash.

Mobile browsers will never keep up with desktop browsers

Of course this is true. Does that mean we should be content having a browser that is 10 years behind the curve? No.

Android, as little as I care about it right now, is going to be interesting in this regard. A truly open mobile platform built by a real Internet Company. Quite intriguing indeed…

I am going to do my best not to get overly critical here as it seems like I’ve been ripping into Nokia a bit much lately. At the same time however, I would be remiss if I avoid posting about certain things because I might “hurt someone’s feelings”. After all, how would a company ever improve a product without criticism?

That said, the S60 browser has exceeded its useful lifespan. As harsh as it sounds, the internet moved forward and left Nokia’s smartphone browser of choice behind long ago. “Web 2.0″ is already a term so overused that many people are actually angered by it, and yet the S60 Browser just doesn’t handle new technologies well at all. Notice that “new” was written in italics.

Rather than go on and on about how Nokia should be embarrassed to call a device a “multimedia computer” when it can’t even handle a basic “Web 2.0″ site built on Drupal and jQuery, I’ll just show you what I’m talking about. The following is a Firefox screen shot of a great website I found this morning:

And now, that same page in the S60 Browser:

Mind you, it took three crashes before I could keep the S60 Browser open long enough to take that screen shot. This, by the way, was on my N95 8GB with about 73MB of free RAM.

Needless to say, the internet has changed A LOT since the S60 Browser was introduced and the browser simply hasn’t kept up. Only recently was Flash support added and this was after engineers had all but shunned Flash years ago. We’re at the point where a mobile browser built by the world’s leading handset manufacturer / Internet company should be able to handle a simple web service like Streetread with ease…

EDIT: Just to clarify, this is a “boiling point” post. My complaint is not that this particular site doesn’t work. Having Streetread crash on me seven times this morning was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. I visit several sites each week that either don’t work well in the S60 Browser, or don’t work at all.

No I’m not insane, calling for a mobile browser with desktop functionality. What I am calling for however, is a mobile browser from an Internet Company that sells more smartphones than any other company in the world… to handle basic web technology that has been widely adopted for several years already.

I wrote up a piece yesterday on The Outsidr that discusses a relatively new web service called Only2Clicks. If having your bookmarks presented to you visually - on any computer or mobile browser - is of interest to you, I highly recommend you head over and give it a read. The concept and implementation are excellent; it has quickly become a useful tool for me. Just last night in fact, my area suffered a power outage that lasted about 15 hours. Because I now work exclusively on my desktop (lappy is dead) I had to head out and find a different computer to work on. Thankfully, Only2Clicks not only prevented this from being a total nightmare, it made it quite simple.

After publishing the article, I started thinking. I noted near the end thatOnly2Clicks provides an iPhone interface that allows you to not only access your bookmarks on any computer, but also on any full-browser equipped mobile. Here’s a screenshot from my N95-4:

What this made me realize however, is just how different my computer and mobile browsing habits really are. Here I have the real internet in my pocket (as Apple would say), and about 90% - 95% of my mobile browsing is done on mobile-formatted websites. Why?

1. “Real” webpages are too big
2. Mobile processors are too slow
3. Connectivity options are too slow (yes, even HSDPA and WiFi)
4. Mobile screens are too small

Why go to jaiku.com when I can go to m.jaiku.com and interact 10 times as fast (more like 50 times as fast sometimes)? Why use standard Google services when the mobile options are so light and fantastically fit for mobile consumption? I do visit some full pages from time to time but I’ll never spend much time on any one or click through several pages.

If you’re reading this blog, chances are pretty good that you have the real internet in your pocket as well. Do you use it?

(of note, I’ve created a “Mobile” tab that stores all of the sites I frequent from my mobile. In other words, Only2Clicks is still usable [and awesome] on my N95-4.)

Odd that I haven’t seen any mention of this this before because it really does annoy me. Am I the only one whose N95 8GB browser fails to render thumbnails properly for the “Back” screen? Is it an early firmware bug that was resolved with the v20 upgrade in Europe? It works sometimes but more often than not, I have at least one or two blank thumbnails with each session. Am I the only one?

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Opera, the creators behind the widely used Opera Mini / Mobile browsers for mobile handsets, which brings full web pages optimized to handsets has put up a video demonstrating their latest Mobile Browser which as been updated to 9.5. Where Opera Mini is widely available for handsets supporting Java, Opera Mobile is mainly aimed at the Smartphones, Windows Mobile and Symbian handsets only.

The video of Opera Mobile 9.5 demonstrates mainly the speed of the browser, comparing it to the Internet Explorer browser found on Windows Smartphones, it claims to be 2.5x faster, and watching the video clip it’s evident it is pretty fast. The reason for this, Opera point out the Presto layout engine which claims to achieve near desktop like page loads, obviously that’s dependant on your internet connection speeds? What’s more interesting is the support for JavaScript and AJAX commonly used by Gmail which Opera Mobile 9.5 handles easier with faster loading times. That I do like.

Opera Mobile gives you:

• A true Web experience optimized for mobile phones
• The ability to offer Web applications right on the idle screen
• The full richness of Web 2.0 services using AJAX
• Blazing speed with Opera’s Presto rendering engine
• Accelerated time to market with Opera Widgets
• A proven product with focus on innovation, quality and user experience

Initial public unveiling is expected on February 11th at GSMA, expect a public Beta version to be available soon after that.

A full Product Data Sheet can be found on here.

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