Mobile internet browsing
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James Hatts
- Posts: 309
- Joined: Sat 16 Aug, 2003 23.34
- Location: London
say what you like about the iPhone, its web browser is very impressive.
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Lorns
- Posts: 3149
- Joined: Thu 24 Mar, 2005 22.48
- Location: A room with a view. 15 Hookey street, the Edge.
- Contact:
The nokia 3210 will always have a special place in my heart. It is the only phone i've had that was reliable. I would drop it, throw it and on several occasions drowned it by dropping it down the lav. It never broked well never broked for long. The magic of this phone was in the simplicity and durability. It made and recieved calls and texts only. Absolutely brilliant!
I love my Motorzr but it has flaws. The best thing about it is the paintjob. I want my car sprayed with the same paint they use on the phone as it seems to chip resistant for the abuse it gets.
I know this has nothing to do with mobile web browsing. Its just that with the more technology a phone has the shorter its lifespan seems to be. There is always something that goes wrong.
Oh and if i browse the web on my Rzr its usually on tvf if i'm away from my laptop and i'm incredibly bored.
I love my Motorzr but it has flaws. The best thing about it is the paintjob. I want my car sprayed with the same paint they use on the phone as it seems to chip resistant for the abuse it gets.
I know this has nothing to do with mobile web browsing. Its just that with the more technology a phone has the shorter its lifespan seems to be. There is always something that goes wrong.
Oh and if i browse the web on my Rzr its usually on tvf if i'm away from my laptop and i'm incredibly bored.
Mental anxiety, Mental breakdowns, Menstrual cramps, Menopause... Did you ever notice how all our problems begin with Men?
OK, so having had 4 days to play with it, here's my official review of the Pocket Surfer 2 (or 'PS2' as work decided to enter it as on the computer - better hope Sony don't go fishing around our system...that said I'm surprised IBM didn't challenge Sony back in 2000 since they trademarked 'PS/2' in the late 1980's).nodnirG kraM wrote:Captial letters optional on it?
The way the thing basically works is that somewhere in Canada is a web server running IE6 (bang up to date then lol). When you access a page on the device, it actually just sends a request for the server in Canada to access it, the server then applies horrendous levels of compression to the page (by default reducing images to just 16 colours - although this can be changed at the expense of speed) yet retains the original layout than sends an image of the page over to the device. The Canada-based server is interesting in itself - type in 'www.google.com' and instead of being redirected to google.co.uk you get sent to google.ca, websites which also require verification of your being in the UK will also fail to load because the computer accessing them is not in the UK)
This means that you can see a website in it's original layout and size (the screen is only 640 pixels wide but you've got a choice of viewing it at full size and scrolling or pressing a button and making it scale down to fit the screen) and have it load quickly, and it can also load any page that Internet Explorer can, hence it's claim to give you 'the whole internet'.
There's some fairly ropey GPS built into it too - when I first started it up it though it was in London. After several days it changed to my actual location. Today when I went on a train journey for the first half hour or so it was faithfully following me up the railway track (the images it displays are pinched from Google maps), then for no apparent reason it gave up and showed me back at home again. The GPS is also of extremely limited use - it will show you where you are (when it feels like it), but provides no means to plot routes to anywhere else - which is surely the whole point of having GPS.
The first page you see when the device connects looks inviting and PDA like (it's actually just another web page but designed to fit the screen), providing prominant links to '25GB storage', 'Access my PC' and 'Word/Spreadsheet' (alongside the 'current' location of the device via GPS - although whether or not that location is where you actually are depends on what mood its in), but following all of them just links you to various free online services which don't fit the screen properly and as such are pretty unuseable - it's certainly not a viable PDA, despite what the publicity suggests (and what I thought it would be on a previous post).
On top of all of it, because you are not viewing an actual live webpage, just an image of one previously loaded onto the server there are A) security issues (you *can* use it to buy things online, but would you *want* to when your card details are actually being entered into someone else's computer?) and B) issues with websites that aren't static (flash on the Pocket Surfer is a no-no - indeed even the drop down menus on TV Forum give it trouble),
The above might seem like I'm not too happy with my Pocket Surfer; but on the contrary I actually love it to bits. It provides a web browsing experience beyond that which any mobile phone can (mainly in that it's actually viable to reply to emails/posts in forums rather than just read them) and I can see webpages on the go in their original layout. It's also never, ever, failed to get me a working, fast connection wheras every web-enabled mobile I've had has always struggled as soon as you present it with obstacles like travelling on trains.
The Pocket Surfer 2 browses the web in the way that you wish your mobile would, but not in the way that your computer does (despite what the manufacturers claim). If you want the former, you'll be over the moon with it. If you want the latter, give it a miss.