What do you mean you cant beleive all the complaints?
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My browser use on the ppc has always been that I open the browser to look something up, check news, weather, or a post on a site. When I'm done, I exit, not minimize, the browser. This was really a pain with pie and I think mozilla for ppc as well using either ctrl-q or a task killer. I never wanted it open with other things though because browsers are such hogs. I guess I'm just not concerned about missing appointments because of it since it's extremely rare that I use my ppc browser at work and at work is when most of my alarms are set to go off.
I'm just stoked to have a useful browser that renders pages very well and, I think, is very easy to navigate!!! To me, this is a first! I've tried the one from Access, Mozilla for ppc, and I think a few others but nothing is close. I'm finally happy with my pocket pc browser. It was driving me nuts when iphones had a browser that was so much better. It's not just look and feel thing, it's more usable or not.
Last edited by Jason Dunn; 07-18-2008 at 05:34 PM..
Not bad Opera team. Definitely a step ahead of IEMobile. You guys definitely get the "finger-centric UI".
I still find it clunky though, resistive screens just don't play well with gesture scrolling.
I'm running it on a 624Mhz HP4700 with an illegitimate 6.1 build, so maybe that has something to do with the clunkyness.
All up I am very impressed with the beta... But to be honest, WM7's IEMobile is going to need this plus an overall 25% improvement to put a dampener on the iphone juggernaut. Apple nailed that browser first go.
Although it's interesting and has some nice features, I have to agree with some of the other posters. This version is not ready for prime time.
It's very unstable and when I click on things, there is a MANY second lag before anything happens, including when you try to pop up the menu. That tripped me up a few times before I figured out what was happening.
The rendering is definitely much better than PIE, but the program needs to go through a little more testing and revision and testing and improvement before I can make it a daily driver.
Despite what some have said, I don't feel it holds a candle to Safari on the iPhone - yet. Safari is a much smoother and consistently pleasant experience today. Opera Mobile has a lot of promise, but still needs to clean up a bit. Great step in the right direction, but not quite there yet.
Although it's interesting and has some nice features, I have to agree with some of the other posters. This version is not ready for prime time.
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The rendering is light years better as are the loading times for most websites. Just use the build 1522 at xda-developers.com and you dont have any notification problems or excessive memory hickups. It also has a nicer skin.
Its pretty stable for a pre-beta-version too. No flash here too, sadly.
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post edited by Rocco for excessive flamming. Thanks for editing, err, I mean censoring my post!
I don't know what your original post said, but I'd encourage you to tone down your comments. It's certain possible to express anger and frustration with a company without dropping "FU's" everywhere. You may have noticed our forums are quite friendly - please try to match the tone of the others here and you'll find your posts won't need editing.
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I'm just stoked to have a useful browser that renders pages very well and, I think, is very easy to navigate!!! To me, this is a first! I've tried the one from Access, Mozilla for ppc, and I think a few others but nothing is close. I'm finally happy with my pocket pc browser. It was driving me nuts when iphones had a browser that was so much better. It's not just look and feel thing, it's more usable or not.
Granted, it has potential. It looks awsome, and its features are very useful for browsing the internet on limited screensize. However, my pda is a productivity tool first, and a toy second. With that said, alarms (at any time of the day, all day) are indespencible. I imagine that is the case for most people who own a PDA in any form (smart phone or not). Which means, they need to fix it if they truely want the rest of it put through the numbers. Another thing to think on is the size. Not everyone upgrades their PDA when something new hits the market. There are more users out there with limited ram space than those with bleeding edge units with twice the space. This program is a hog as it currently stands. I will still test it with its current footprint howerver...ONCE I get my alarms back BUt thats something they should consider.
The last item of contention (though not that big to me...but still an anoyance) is the lag between a tap and an action. Previous versions and other browsers show an instant reaction. We have grown use to it and opera needs to mimic it...no questions, just do it.
There is a lot to like about the new Opera Mobile. It's really attractive and stylish. I particularly like the zoom animation, where they blow up each pixel in the overview to the size it will occupy in the zoomed-in view and then replace the heavily-pixelated image with the high-resolution version, and the automatic full-screen mode is great, too.
Running it side-by-side with the Skyfire beta makes for an interesting comparison. For relatively simple text-based web sites, like pocketpcthoughts.com, the experience is very similar: you start out with a zoomed-out view of the page, then double-tap on an area of interest to zoom in and read. Both format columns of text so that it will exactly fill the screen width in the zoomed-in view, and both do it very well. The principal difference here is performance: with Opera, the entire page is sent to the phone and rendered on the device, which means that getting to the initial view can take a long time. Once it's there, however, everything is right on the phone, so zooming in and out and panning around happen immediately. With Skyfire, the page fetch and rendering occurs on the remote server, with only a portion of the page, and only the zoomed-out version of that portion, being transferred and displayed on the phone, which makes it much faster to get to the initial view. Zooming in and out and panning more than a small distance, however, has to hit the server again for a refresh, so that is somewhat slower than with Opera.
At the moment, Skyfire has the edge in the kinds of sites it supports; ActiveX (notably Flash) is not supported in the current Opera Mobile beta. Combining that with the performance issues and the other problems in the current beta, I'm going to continue for the time being to use Skyfire as my browser of choice except for banking sites and such where I want to keep my passwords on my phone and not on a third-part server. I wonder about the practicality of running a full-featured browser all on a phone, though. Admittedly, I'm using a pretty limited device (Cingular 8525, with only 64 MB of memory and a slow processor), so it will be interesting for me to see how Opera Mobile performs in a production build on a more capable device (assuming that AT&T picks up one or more of the new SE, HTC, or Samsung devices so that I can afford to upgrade). However, assuming Skyfire can develop a viable business model, I think their approach is more scalable and should offer better performance and capabilities for at least the medium term (until we get really fast processors and high wireless bandwidth).
I like it!
BUt thats something they should consider.
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