Tag Archives: Opera

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Nokia N770 – Does Exactly what it Says on the Tin

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Nokia N770

Shortly before we went off to France, I came across a special offer from Expansys on the Nokia N770 Internet Tablet. When it was released, the device retailed for just under £250 – Expansys were selling it for £75.

The tablets seemed to be going like hot cakes, and it really was a bargain price. I e-mailed around to see if anyone had any experience of using the N770 – Howard replied by return that he’d ordered two already. Reading many of the initial reviews it was very much of a ‘nice idea but…’ – the Ars Technica review being a perfect example. The main criticisms are the lack of power in the hardware, which led to sluggish performance. Reading on apparently the latest units were shipping with an updated OS which addressed some of the shortcomings, but focus had now shifted to the machines successor, the N800. One of my colleagues had also purchased one of the original machines and confirmed that it was sluggish, and in his words a bit quirky – however the fact it ran Maemo, a version of Debian GNU/Linux meant that it was an interesting machine to mess around with.

On that basis I put my money down and ordered one – a good job I did, as within days they were all gone!

So why did I buy one? One of the things I least like about either a Pocket PC PDA or a smartphone is the internet experience. Pocket PC, as with most of the on board applications ships with a pretty poor excuse for a browser. On the smartphone you either have Opera Mini which granted does a pretty creditable job with limited resources, or solutions like the Symbian browser that while it can handle full web pages leaves you trying to scan around the pages with a pretty small view – sort of like trying to read a newspaper looking through a pinhole! The simple fact is that the form factor is wrong for web pages. The web is designed for people with regular or widescreen landscape monitors – aside from a couple of Nokia devices the entire market consists of portrait based screens. The concept for the N770 is to build a device that is ideal for browsing the internet on the move – not to build a PDA with internet features – this is very much a targeted device. Although the processor is underpowered and the memory limited, Nokia had ensured that they put a great screen into the unit. My figuring was that even if the internet was totally unusable, with the quality of the screen we could at least use it as some sort of electronic picture frame!

Anyway, having given it a work out for a couple of weeks, it’s really pretty good. Most web pages fit nicely on the screen width wise, and are perfectly readable thanks to the screen. The e-mail client is pretty basic – but since I can run webmail in the browser it’s not too much of an issue. The browser is Opera based, but has limitations, chief being that it doesn’t work with Google Reader. There are a couple of ways around this. Firstly there is a port of Minimo, a Mozilla based browser for devices such as PDA’s. Despite support from Nokia, for the N770 and N800 they looked elsewhere, and although I’ve got Minimo to run, the resources on the N770 are too limited and even though it opens more sites, it struggles with resources, and quite often the tablet locks up. Looking at other alternatives, I’ve discovered Reader Mini which is like a halfway house between the full scale Google Reader interface, and the existing Google Reader mobile interface. With that in place, the sites I look at most often all work on the N770.

It’s slightly too large to be really pocketable, but is definitely still portable, so as a device to browse the internet on the move it is great. The supplied software is pretty stable, and the OS is certainly no less stable than Pocket PC. There are various open source packages ported to the platform (take a look at the list at maemo.org) so if I wanted a PIM package I could install one – having said that if I really wanted to leave the PDA at home I have my calendar on my phone too. What the N770 does really well, is exactly what it says on the tin – surfs the internet. All in all it was a bit of a bargain!

Computers/Technology

Opera Comes To PocketPC

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I’ve mentioned before the great Opera Mini, a free web browser for mobile phones. I said in my initial comments that I thought it was better than PocketIE on my PDA, and that I’d download it in an instant if they made it available for PocketPC.

Well now they have. It is currently only available as a beta for users of Windows Mobile 5, and Windows Mobile 2003, plus it is only available as a CAB package, which makes installation a bit more of a manual process – although the site has instructions on how to do this. The beta will also expire in June, which I suspect is an indication that they are going to charge for the full version.

As a totally unscientific comparison, I thought I’d view the same site in both PocketIE, and the new beta version of Opera. For the purposes of the comparison I ran both browsers in portrait mode, (although both will quite happily run in landscape) as like many, I have a PDA that is very much designed to work as a portrait device, and is a bit annoying in landscape. I also chose to use the full graphics version of the BBC News site, as it is a well known site, with a pretty complex layout.

Pocket Internet Explorer

This first shot is what PocketIE produces in single column mode. It does a slightly better job if you allow the browser to lay the page out using a wider space, but then of course you have to have a horizontal scroll bar.

Particular highlights are the mess it’s made of the menu bar across the top of the page, that links to the other parts of the BBC web site, and provides a search facility. Indeed, this takes up most of the visible page, where it even overlaps the BBC logo. Scrolling on down things don’t get much better. All in all it’s a bit of a pain, badly laid out, and a lot of scrolling to use.

Opera Mini

By way of comparison, before I show you what the page looks like on the PocketPC version, I’ve loaded up the same page in Opera Mini. Again, you can’t actually see the news, as all you’re getting are the headers. However it has made a better job than PocketIE, fitting in more than the PDA – equipped with a VGA screen don’t forget.

Of course for any serious use on a screen this size, I’d recommend using the mobile version of the site that the BBC provides at http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm. This is a lot quicker to load, as it transfers a lot less data – also a factor to bear in mind if you’re using any sort of connection that is charged by data volume.

PocketPC Opera

Finally, here is exactly the same page in the PocketPC Opera.

Even in portrait, the menu bar fits neatly into one line at the top of the screen, with the logo and the rest of the header in about the top quarter of the screen.

You can see the top story, plus the first part of the next few stories below – you’ve even got the navigation links on the left hand and right hand side of the screen. In addition, it also includes the headline ticker above the top story. Indeed, aside the from the big gap underneath the picture in the main story, it looks pretty much like the site would look on a desktop.

As you can see, it’s managing to do this by using significantly smaller fonts than PocketIE, but if you can read those, then it is a pretty impressive feat, and actually promises to give a pretty good approximation of the desktop experience.

As I said, it is a beta, so it does produce some layout glitches from time to time, for example on this site it sometimes leaves a massive gap under the desktop ticker, but I expect that those will be sorted out before the actual release. Certainly even in it’s beta state, it is still a pretty usable tool, and I’ll look forward to the full release in a few months.