It had to come this way, I am a proud owner of a Nokia N93 now. Many reviews have been written about the phone so I have no intention of adding another one. Instead, I will write down my impressions about what I like and also about what I don't like about the phone beyond what is said in the numerous reviews.
This entry is about the new Nokia Web Browser: I was quite sceptical if it could do better than the Opera browser which I have been using on my N70. A lot has been written about the browser on the web already, including the fantastic minimap feature which shows you where you are on the page while scrolling. What I always wondered about and was never really able to get out of the reviews was how one is able to read web pages if they are not reformatted. After using the browser myself for a couple of minutes, the answer came quickly: While the page is shown on the minimap approximately as it would be rendered by a desktop browser, the page and especially the text is reformated in the main window. This works surprisingly well. I've tried many web sites and only once did the reformating of the text blocks of the page to the width of the screen fail. Congratulations to the S60 browser team, the browser really gives me the best mobile web browsing experience I ever had!
While I have already come to love the browser I've discovered two rather nasty issues as well:
The first one is its memory consumption. On the N93 which is supposed to be Nokia's flagship product, the browser quickly takes all available memory and the OS in turn closes other applications. Very bad behaviour which I hoped would be a thing of the past after I switched from the 6680 to the N70. It seems that there is a software update that might fix this issue but I haven't been able to download it so far.
The second issue is stability. Even though my software version is quite up to date (*#0000#) shows 12.07.06 the browser crashes quite frequently when browsing on normal web pages. Still some work to do here... Not a big issue for me at the moment, though, as most web sites I access on the mobile have a mobile friendly version of their content.
So much about the browser for the moment, stay tuned for further impressions.
For me, I am still using both S60 OSS browser and Opera depends on the situation. S60 OSS browser is useful for viewing full web page and where WiFi is available. I usually use Opera when I don't have WiFi because it is able to "compress" the web page.
Posted by: Antony Pranata | November 26, 2006 at 01:56 AM
Hi Martin, I think you may be interested participating in my polling about favorite S60 browser (that includes S60 OSS browser). Here is the link, http://www.s60tips.com/2006/12/16/polling-what-is-your-favorite-s60s-web-browser/
Posted by: Antony Pranata | December 16, 2006 at 11:53 PM