{"id":5515,"date":"2009-10-30T17:53:59","date_gmt":"2009-10-31T00:53:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=5515"},"modified":"2009-11-01T17:52:10","modified_gmt":"2009-11-02T00:52:10","slug":"first-look-at-the-n900-microb-fennec-and-droid-browser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/5515\/","title":{"rendered":"First Look at the N900 MicroB, Fennec and Droid Browsers"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a great time at yesterday’s N900 meetup in San Francisco.\u00a0 It was organized by N Series US<\/a>‘ Matt Bennet and TnkGrl Mobile<\/a>‘s TnkGrl and sponsored by Nokia who graciously picked up the bar tab and provided a couple of N900’s to play with. Matt posted some photos<\/a> of the meet up and Tnkgrl’s video coverage is on her blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The N900 is a fantastic device that really feels more like a computer than a phone.\u00a0 Mathew and Tnkgrl have each had\u00a0 loaner N900s for a couple of weeks and both were very enthusiastic about the device, especially the OS and software.\u00a0 One of them said it was far more stable than any S60 phone they had ever used. And this is with pre-release firmware.<\/p>\n

Focusing on WapReview’s subject area, I spent most of my time with the N900 using the browser.\u00a0 It’s the latest version of\u00a0 MicroB<\/em>, Nokia’s in-house Mozilla Gecko based browser for Maemo devices.\u00a0 MicroB’s big claim to fame is that it includes support for the latest 9.4 version of\u00a0 Adobe Flash. I had no trouble playing videos on the desktop version of YouTube in MicroB.\u00a0 In fact, MicroB handled every page I tried throwing at it. Most pages loaded at a default zoom level where text was readable with no horizontal scrolling needed on the N900’s\u00a0 800×480 px 3.5 inch screen.\u00a0 If you do want to adjust the zoom MicroB supports double-taping to zoom in plus a unique gesture based fine zoom.\u00a0 I found it easier and faster to get the desired zoom level using MicroB’s swirling gesture than with the iPhone’s pinch zoom.\u00a0 To zoom on the N900 you draw a little circle on the screen, clockwise to zoom in, counter clockwise to zoom out.\u00a0 The only thing holding back the usability of gestures in MicroB is the insensitivity of the resistive touch screen. Using a fingernail rather than a finger tip helps immensity but why doesn’t\u00a0 Nokia’s latest flagship phone\u00a0 have a capacitive screen?\u00a0 Still this is a great browser. Even with the resistive screen, I believe that the N900 browser is the best I’ve ever used on a phone. Maybe I’m missing something but it seems a little too gimmicky and not very intuitive.<\/p>\n

Three members of Mozilla’s Fennec<\/a> team showed up to demonstrate the unreleased 5th Beta of Maemo on an N900.\u00a0 TnkGrl caught the\u00a0 demo on video<\/a>. I didn’t get any hands-on with Fennec but it seemed quick and responsive, unlike previous Fennec Beta’s I’ve tried on Windows Mobile phones. Fennec features an unusual UI paradigm where you slide a finger toward different edges of the screen to bring up various menus.<\/p>\n

Unlike MicroB, which uses a stripped down\u00a0 subset of the full Mozilla stack lacking support for some Firefox add-ons\u00a0 and SVG, Fennec includes virtually every core feature in desktop Firefox.\u00a0 At the meet up Mozilla demonstrated Weave <\/em>running on the N900. Weave is a Firefox add-on that synchronizes\u00a0 bookmarks, tabs, browsing history and remembered passwords across multiple browsers both desktop and mobile.<\/p>\n

Fennec Beta 5,\u00a0 is expected to be the last Beta before the full Fennec Maemo release,\u00a0 and it should be out next month.\u00a0 The Fennec developers indicated that they were currently focused on Maemo but were excited about the possibility of bringing Fennec to Android next.\u00a0 With Opera also developing an Android browser we could soon see a full scale browser war between Google, Mozilla and Opera happening on Android. That sort of competition would be great for Android users.\u00a0 I also got the impression from talking with the Mozilla guys that not much is currently happening with Fennec for Windows Mobile or Symbian.<\/p>\n

$\"Motorola$ <\/p>\n

Tankgrl also brought the Motorola Droid that she had just received from Verizon.\u00a0 I was impressed with the Droid’s iPhone like thinness, metal body,\u00a0 gorgeous 3.7 inch,\u00a0 480×854 px capacitive touch screen and\u00a0 sleek industrial design.\u00a0\u00a0 I found the Droid’s keyboard disappointing however.\u00a0 The keys are good-sized but are flat and flush with each other.\u00a0 It’s almost impossible to “feel” which key you are hitting. Typing on the Droid keyboard actually felt more like typing on a touchscreen virtual keyboard than a physical one. The N900’s\u00a0 keyboard has domed keys and gave the impression that I could type significantly faster and more accurately on it.<\/p>\n

The Droid is the first Android 2.0 (Eclair) phone.\u00a0 The big new Eclairfeature isn’t actually something in the OS itself but the game changing\u00a0 inclusion of navigation into the version of Google Maps that ships with 2.0.\u00a0 The new OS release really doesn’t look or feel much different than Android 1.6.\u00a0 I guess most of the changes are behind the scenes.\u00a0 I will say that the Android GUI seems much snappier on the Droid than on the G1 and MyTouch.\u00a0 I wonder if that is all due to the faster processor or if performance enhancements in 2.0 play a role too.<\/p>\n

I was eager to try the Android 2.0 browser to see if the page cache and memory management issues that have been in the browser since the first Android release were fixed.\u00a0 The problem is that the browser is only able to cache very small pages.\u00a0 Pressing the “Back” button almost always causes the previous page to be retrieved from the cloud rather than from cache.\u00a0 This slows down browsing.\u00a0 What’s worse\u00a0 is that if you leave the browser running in the background to briefly use another app, even just to read a text message or an email, when you return to the browser it reloads the page from the web again.\u00a0 This completely breaks sites like Google Reader and Twitter where the reloaded page\u00a0 will usually contain different information than what you were reading before you switched away from the browser.\u00a0 I didn’t see any improvement with 2.0 browser still reloading pages that should have been cached.\u00a0 I was also hoping for multi-touch pinch zooming and full Flash support but neither seemed to make the cut.<\/p>\n

There are some new features in the 2.0 Browser.\u00a0 Double tap zoom is now officially supported, along with HTML5’s <video> tag.\u00a0 Speaking of Web standards, the browser’s now supports the HTML5 draft spec’s Client-Side Database,\u00a0 Application Cache, and\u00a0 Geolocation\u00a0 APIs in addition to maintaining backward compatibility with support for the Gears equivalents.<\/p>\n

I’m very excited to see all the recent activity in the mobile browser space.\u00a0 The iPhone has legitimized mobile browsing and unleashed a flurry of activity in the advanced mobile browser space by Nokia, Mozilla, Google, Opera, BlackBerrry and others.\u00a0 Which means ever more devices supporting richer mobile Web apps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"