Quote:
Originally Posted by ricoks
But if you look at the HTC Advantage, with it's 5" screen, and how there have been so many ppl that have praised it's ability to make web browsing so much more satisfying, this makes sense to me, and personally, I've been hoping for this all along.
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I don't disagree with you there. I've played with the HTC Advantage before, and can attest to the general sentiment that it is a better and more comfortable device for browsing - if you compare it with your standard QVGA device running Windows Mobile.
However, despite sporting a 5" display, IE Mobile still lets it down. Sure, more screen real estate is always a bonus, but if you use the browser to visit almost any non-mobile-friendly site, it looks awful - that is, if it doesn't grind to a halt first. And if you don't set it to a screen-fitting, one-column view, there's bound to be a lot of sluggish scrolling with the stylus or VueFLO. So apart from doing a poor job at rendering pages, IE Mobile doesn't exactly encourage friendly navigation either.
Of course, you could futz around with third-party browsers such as NetFront or Opera Mobile, but even they don't do the best of all jobs, and having to rely on these doesn't exactly say much about the out-of-the-box experience that Microsoft would undoubtedly rely on to try and captivate its consumer audience.
Now, let's bring the iPhone and iPod touch into the picture. Both have smaller screens with a resolution of 320 x 480. Safari isn't perfect; it does have limitations, but what it does, it does well. You can comfortably visit almost any non-mobile-friendly site, and expect it to load fast and look great. And scrolling and zooming is rarely sluggish, because Apple's nailed the navigation experience too.
The purpose of an MID is to provide a rich Internet experience on-the-go. If I was in the market for a device that did just that and compared a device such as the Advantage and the iPhone/iPod touch, I would go for the latter. Not because the screen is larger and has a higher-res, but because it does what I want it to: it delivers that rich Internet experience.
And MIDs that run Windows XP/Vista or MID-oriented flavours of Linux deliver that rich Internet experience too. In its current iteration, Windows Mobile simply cannot do this. Whack the OS on a 5" device, and it may be an MID by name, but not by nature.