There are lots of browsers available for various platforms and there are some for the Symbian S60 mobile phone operating system. I will cover the Opera Mini, Skyfire and Ozone for the Nokia E71. The browsers will be tested against the home page of this blog.
Opera Mini is not your typical browser where it requests for web pages from the desired websites. It uses Opera’s server farm to proxy the requests. The pages downloaded from Opera are compressed and pre-processed for the handphone model. Attached below is a screenshot.
Opera showing a page to download Screenshot
Strangely the home page for this blog does not show up properly.
Opera Mini and my home page
Opera Mini expects an Internet readily connection available. If you are using on a public Internet where pre authentication is required, pages will not display. You will need to use the handphone build in browser to login before switching over to Opera Mini.
Skyfire is a very lightweight based browser that operates similar to Opera. It renders the home page properly. The only gripe that I have is that the fonts are really small and definition poor. The text does not look crisp.
Skyfire showing the home page properly
Note the bookmarks are kept on their server, not in your hand phone. It appears to be a very heavy user of the data connection. If the device is not use for few seconds, the display will gray out, similar to a screensaver. On activation, it will reconnect to download on the same page even when I have not click through.
Skyfire bookmarks
Ozone is a browser based on Webkit that is on alpha release. It is very quick and snappy.
Ozone
The screen looks crisp but unfortunately I can’t use it . All the text is showing up as boxes.
Ozone showing the homepage
Even a simple screen of links is showing up as boxes.
Ozone on the index page.
Clearly, more work needs to be done to reach beta.
Last browser in the line up is Nokia’s build in browser or Web Browser for S60. It is based on Webkit version 412. It comes with a mini map feature will allow the user view a small section of the web page. It is very handy navigating large web pages.
On the default Nokia browser, only 1.5 columns shows up.
Nokia
The final word, there are lots of web browsers for handphones. All of them work differently and not all of them can show the test page properly. The best renderer is Skyfire, but the screen display left much to be desired.