NetFront 3.0 for Pocket PC's Available

[Janak Parekh]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.access.co.jp/english/ppc/' target='_blank'>http://www.access.co.jp/english/ppc/</a><br /><br /></div>NetFront, the guys who built next-gen Palm browsers, have released a new version for Pocket PC's. Features include <li> HTML 4.01, JavaScript 1.5 compliance<br /><li> Tabbed-window browsing<br /><li> Horizontal fit<br /><li> Offline browsing<br /><li> Optional PersonalJava support, applet support<br /> Has anyone given this a try? I use Thunderhawk myself, but this may be another promising alternative to Pocket IE.

[garretwp]

For some reason i can not get to the link. Hmmm if it is a alturnitive to pie then that would be so great. as someone really needs to make a alturnitive browser for the pocket pc. also wanted to add a review here http://www.infosync.no/news/2002/n/2252.html it talks about all the features of the browser etc.

Garrett

[that_kid]

I just tried it and I really like it. It is a big program but I can finally access my credit union's account using my ipaq. I'm going to play with it some more and see if I can access some media sites that didn't work with pie. The biggest problem I have is with news sites like msnbc who use java and embedded windows media players. Now I can access the site but I haven't found a way to play embedded windows media streams in it :( . If anyone knows could you let me know

[JonnoB]

Can anyone tell me if it works in landsape mode.... or with alternatively, if it works well with one of the landscape utitlity apps? Also, can it view PPC formatted sites if desired?

[Daimaou]

No don't work in landscape

but if You want I tested this soft in English a week ago for a review and you can have a look there, Sorry in French but with Bablefish you may be able to have an interesting translation.

http://ppcreviews.sorobangeeks.com/index.php?revue=32

It is honestly an amazing Software! just some 2 or 3 little missing stuff but Amazing.

[portus]

It is very well implemented. The peformance seems on par with PIE. The supported helper apps and file extensions are, however, limited. Windows Media file extensions are not supported. MPEG videos formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-4, streaming MPEG, etc.) are supported through external helper apps like PocketTV, PocketMVP.

Quite disappointed that it does not support landscape mode. Guess I misunderstood the meaning of "horizontal fit" support. It just means content can be wrapped horizontally (words are broken up, however) so there's no need to scroll over horizontally. Guess we'll have to wait for WindowsCE .NET for true landscape support. Hope that by the time the CE .NET spec is out, VGA resolution is supported on the newer generation of PPC devices!

[mike6024]

I just checked out Thunderhawk's preview pages and that looks really nice. I would be very interested, if not for the $49.95 price tag. And what's worse, that's just for a year's subscription. Subscription-based pricing on software like this is evil... just pure evil.

[yada88]

Janak, what do you think about thunderhawk. I contemplated getting it, but 50$ is a lot to spend on one program for only a year. Does it work well. Does it handle sites PIE can't? Is it really any faster than PIE? I think a lot of people would like a front page post with impressions about thunderhawk, as many of us use our ppcs for web browsing. I personally have a T39 through bluetooth hooked up to my 3970, and love it. The only problem is that I do IT work, and PIE can't handle the cgi script that handles my company's web and email server.

Jeff

[Doug Raeburn]

IMO, Thunderhawk is well worth the investment if you're serious about web browsing on your Pocket PC. When I was considering it, I tried the then beta version of NetFront along with NVD to see if I could get anything like the clarity and readability of Thunderhawk with another product at the resolutions that Thunderhawk supports. Nothing else even came close. Web browsing in portrait mode just doesn't cut it... I don't care how capable the browser is. And only Thunderhawk has the fonts specifically optimized for web browsing on the Pocket PC.

Portable and effective web browsing on my Pocket PC is something that I use all the time. Thunderhawk is the only product that can provide a near PC-quality web browsing experience on the Pocket PC. If that's not worth $4 a month, then I guess you really don't value such an experience very much. If I have one less Mickey D's Extra Value meal per month, that pays for Thunderhawk, and Thunderhawk doesn't clog my arteries. :wink:

Subscription based pricing for Thunderhawk is necessary because you're not really buying a piece of client software, you're buying an ongoing service. Bitstream processes web pages through their own servers to provide the exceptional clarity of the images Thunderhawk provides. That's a fundamental part of the design of Thunderhawk, it's what makes it special. And, guess what? Nobody provides Bitstream with free server hardware and administration. So they have the "audacity" to charge for the ongoing use of their servers. To call it "evil" just because it's a subscription is unfair, in my opinion. If it was just software, I'd agree, but that's not the case.

[Janak Parekh]

Doug, well-put.

I justified the price of ThunderHawk by realizing that I won't keep equivalent software for more than 1 or maybe 2 years at the most anyway, so the subscription service is still conceptually affordable as compared to shrink-wrap.

But it's definitely not for everyone -- it's on the high-end of the PPC price curve.

--janak

[mccollin]

You should read the dialog and FAQs at pdaPhoneHome on this one... if you have a Phone Edition. First off, Access does not support Phone Edition, and the product doesn't work (without some work arounds) on a T-Mobile device. Here (http://pdaphonehome.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=391) is a news link, that has some discussion about the problems, and a link to the FAQ that discusses some of the work arounds.

[Fats]

After reading the posts I was all ready to buy thunderhawk to use on my H5450....

Wouldn't install though, the 5450 won't be supported unitl v1.06. For the functionality and quality (from what I hear) the product is well worth the minimal monthly fee.

[Paragon]

I tried Thunderhawk several times, and I found it useless. Without it doing any kind of cache I found it totally annoying to scroll down a page. Everytime you scoll it has to reload the page. To me that's not faster at all.

There are lots of people posting that they like Thunderhawk, and I don't doubt there word for a second. I'm just wondering what you do differently then the rest of us who don't like this product.

From all the posts I have read on this product I would have to guess that it's close to 50/50, as many like it as those that don't. There seems to be little grey area. You either like Thunderhawk, and think it's the best thing since sliced bread, or you hate it, because of the cache problems. It's normal for people to fall on different sides of an issue, but this seems different. The gap seems so wide. I would really like to say that Thunderhawk is a great app and everyone should use it, but.......

For those of you using it, how have you overcome this issue? Or, does it just not matter to you?

Dave

[anthonymoody]

"I'm just wondering what you do differently then the rest of us who don't like this product. "

We surf in landscape mode.

And pages look and fit much better b/c of the way THawk works.

TM

[bdegroodt]

IMO, Thunderhawk is well worth the investment if you're serious about web browsing on your Pocket PC.

Isn't this an oxymoron? :lol:

[Pinnacle]

You should read the dialog and FAQs at pdaPhoneHome on this one... if you have a Phone Edition. First off, Access does not support Phone Edition, and the product doesn't work (without some work arounds) on a T-Mobile device. Here (http://pdaphonehome.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=391) is a news link, that has some discussion about the problems, and a link to the FAQ that discusses some of the work arounds.
I found this out early yesterday. With a GPRS connection on my T-Mobile, I couldn't get any web page to load. As a matter of fact, I got error messages with almost anything I did.

I switched to a dial-up connection, and the browser worked; but it was PAINFULLY slow.

[Paragon]

"I'm just wondering what you do differently then the rest of us who don't like this product. "

We surf in landscape mode.

And pages look and fit much better b/c of the way THawk works.

TM

anthonymoody

You can do landscape without Thunderhawk. What are your thoughts on scrolling down a page?

[Janak Parekh]

Without it doing any kind of cache I found it totally annoying to scroll down a page. Everytime you scoll it has to reload the page. To me that's not faster at all.
Are you sure about this? For what it's worth, Thunderhawk is no speed demon, and it's not terribly smart about caching. But once the page is loaded, I can scroll without seeing "reloads", on either a GPRS or a WiFi connection. (Scrolling while the page loads in the first place, on the other hand, is pretty painfully slow.)

Thunderhawk definitely prefers a broadband connection, and if you have one it's totally useable. But I've managed to do surfing on GPRS when necessary. I'll still pull up PIE from time to time if I need something really quick.

The key is I can go to any website and read it without having to do horizontal scroll. I'm willing to overlook the speed issues to have that. :)

--janak

[Doug Raeburn]

IMO, Thunderhawk is well worth the investment if you're serious about web browsing on your Pocket PC.

Isn't this an oxymoron? :lol:

And why is that? Do you mean that "serious web browsing" and the Pocket PC are mutually exclusive? Probably true if you're talking Pocket IE or any browser capable of only portrait-orientation, and without optimized fonts. Definitely NOT true if you're talking ThunderHawk.

[Paragon]

Hmmm...was that worth repeating. :D

[bdegroodt]

IMO, Thunderhawk is well worth the investment if you're serious about web browsing on your Pocket PC.

Isn't this an oxymoron? :lol:

And why is that? Do you mean that "serious web browsing" and the Pocket PC are mutually exclusive? Probably true if you're talking Pocket IE ...

et al

[Paragon]

Without it doing any kind of cache I found it totally annoying to scroll down a page. Everytime you scoll it has to reload the page. To me that's not faster at all.
Are you sure about this? For what it's worth, Thunderhawk is no speed demon, and it's not terribly smart about caching. But once the page is loaded, I can scroll without seeing "reloads", on either a GPRS or a WiFi connection. (Scrolling while the page loads in the first place, on the other hand, is pretty painfully slow.)

Thunderhawk definitely prefers a broadband connection, and if you have one it's totally useable. But I've managed to do surfing on GPRS when necessary. I'll still pull up PIE from time to time if I need something really quick.

The key is I can go to any website and read it without having to do horizontal scroll. I'm willing to overlook the speed issues to have that. :)

--janak

janak

Connection speed may very well be at the root of the problem, and would explain the wide difference in performance. I can't say for sure but I'm going to say that the last time I tried it I would have had speeds in the area of 25-30kb/PS. I doubt that you are going to see any huge increases in that number using GPRS as I did, and you have as well.

Your statement of not having to wait for the page to reload is the first time anyone has mentioned it. Usually the response has been "ya, but it doesn't bother me" Maybe they just didn't fully understand the difference as you have. Or maybe it just wasn't as prominent as it is for others

Even if it is a connection speeed problem, isn't that the whole idea of this service....to improve speeds?

dave

[Doug Raeburn]

I tried Thunderhawk several times, and I found it useless. Without it doing any kind of cache I found it totally annoying to scroll down a page. Everytime you scoll it has to reload the page. To me that's not faster at all.

&lt;snip>

For those of you using it, how have you overcome this issue? Or, does it just not matter to you?

Dave

I did nothing to overcome this issue, because it doesn't exist for me. I simply installed it and it works correctly... once a page is loaded, it doesn't have to reload the page to scroll.

Are you using broadband? Otherwise this could be broadband vs. dial-up.

[Janak Parekh]

Connection speed may very well be a the root of the problem, and would explain the wide difference in performance. I can't say for sure but I'm going to say that the last time I tried it I would have had speeds in the area of 25-30kb/PS.
I'd suspect I get the same 3-4 slots as you do on my T68.

Your statement of not having to wait for the page to reaload is the first time anyone has mentioned it. Usually the response has be "ya, but it doesn't bother me" Maybe they just didn't fully understand the difference as you have.
Perhaps, or it's possible I could be wrong. There's definitely a "drawing" time when you scroll, but it's been OK once the page is completely loaded. I'll watch it more closely the next time I use it over GPRS and let you know-- I do mostly use it over Wi-Fi, as I have that at both home and work, and I tend to use it most during meetings at work :D

Even if it is a connection speeed problem, isn't that the whole idea of this service....to improve speeds?
Not really. It's to give the PPC a desktop-like browsing experience. ThunderHawk is a pretty weak browser apart from this fact; you can't use the standard PPC SIP entry methods, if it's running in the background it slows the PPC to a crawl; doesn't support applets, etc. etc. But it does let me read all my sites without any problems, and for me it's worth it.

--janak

[Doug Raeburn]

IMO, Thunderhawk is well worth the investment if you're serious about web browsing on your Pocket PC.

Isn't this an oxymoron? :lol:

And why is that? Do you mean that "serious web browsing" and the Pocket PC are mutually exclusive? Probably true if you're talking Pocket IE ...

et al

ThunderHawk being the notable exception for many of us.

[bdegroodt]

ThunderHawk being the notable exception for many of us.

Don't disagree much with you that many users would agree. And I'll certainly give it credit for displaying pages in a better than PIE way, but it still doesn't change to physical screen size, resolution, device input or speed of the connection, so I find it hard to group the words "serious" and "web browsing on a PPC" together.

BTW, regarding some of the speed issues, I used to use a service called BlueKite. Worked much better than the TM/VoiceStream proxy server. Their site doesn't seem to work anymore. Anyone familiar with them and what has happened to them? (http://www.bluekite.com). They have a free trial (When they were around.) that some of you might find helps with some of the GPRS speed issues.

BD

[Paragon]

Even if it is a connection speeed problem, isn't that the whole idea of this service....to improve speeds?
Not really. It's to give the PPC a desktop-like browsing experience. ThunderHawk is a pretty weak browser apart from this fact; you can't use the standard PPC SIP entry methods, if it's running in the background it slows the PPC to a crawl; doesn't support applets, etc. etc. But it does let me read all my sites without any problems, and for me it's worth it.

--janak

When this service was first being talked about the compression aspects of it were being pushed. I just went back to their site and there is no mention of it. So maybe some of us are expecting more out of it then it is supposed to provide, or was originally planned for it.

Dave

[Paragon]

BTW, regarding some of the speed issues, I used to use a service called BlueKite. Worked much better than the TM/VoiceStream proxy server. Their site doesn't seem to work anymore. Anyone familiar with them and what has happened to them? (http://www.bluekite.com). They have a free trial (When they were around.) that some of you might find helps with some of the GPRS speed issues.

BD

Bluekite is no longer in biz. Too bad it was a great service.

Dave

[Paragon]

For anyone looking to simply increase their speed using dialup checkout PocketDev aka "Karl's Compression proxy" http://www.pocketdev.org/ It works fantastic as a compression proxy. I never actually checked the speeds but it sure felt like it was approaching the 56k mark when I used to use it with my Jornada, and a Timeport CDMA phone.

Dave

[disconnected]

I don't want to go totally into rant mode, but internet browsing is one of the things that went seriously backwards for me.

Browsing with my iPAQ 3630 (PPC2k) + Supplynet Cable + Motorola phone + old Sprint service + Bluekite) was actually pretty speedy, and decently formatted. PPC2k2 PIE in itself slowed things down considerably (on the upgraded 3630 and a new 3975), along with messing up the formatting, and when Bluekite went under I pretty much gave up on the internet experience.

I now have Sprint's new Vision service, which is a lot speedier (although doing nothing for the formatting problem of course); naturally it required the purchase of yet another new phone and a new Supplynet cable (and also causes periodic lock-ups on the iPAQ, for some unexplained reason).

I did subscribe to Thunderhawk, but I found the scrolling problem to be a total show-stopper. I re-installed the latest version when I got the 3975 (the previous version didn't work with the 3975 at all), but it still has the scrolling problem unless there's some newer version I'm not aware of.

[Grey]

Ok, I loaded it, in main memory on my 3970, and all I get is a DNS timeout error. Seems to work fine on the file:///Program%20Files/NetFront3/top.html but if i try to go to www.msn.com or any other page I get Cannot read page. Check connection. Type:DNS timeout

If I use PIE I connect without a problem. I'm stumped, it doesn't seem to work at all for me. I've uninstalled, and reinstalled with no changes at all. I have a live DSL connection, that works for everthing else.

Thanks

[Janak Parekh]

When this service was first being talked about the compression aspects of it were being pushed. I just went back to their site and there is no mention of it. So maybe some of us are expecting more out of it then it is supposed to provide, or was originally planned for it.
Well, they do compress the size of the images ;)

--janak

[Paragon]

When this service was first being talked about the compression aspects of it were being pushed. I just went back to their site and there is no mention of it. So maybe some of us are expecting more out of it then it is supposed to provide, or was originally planned for it.
Well, they do compress the size of the images ;)

--janak

:D

[Doug Raeburn]

ThunderHawk being the notable exception for many of us.

Don't disagree much with you that many users would agree. And I'll certainly give it credit for displaying pages in a better than PIE way, but it still doesn't change to physical screen size, resolution, device input or speed of the connection, so I find it hard to group the words "serious" and "web browsing on a PPC" together.

BD

Agreed, TH doesn't solve every limitation of web browsing on a Pocket PC. But it does at least address the limitations of resolution to some degree with its optimized fonts. I can read contents of TH pages (it normally displays at 640x480) with no problem whatsover... trying that using such a resolution with Pocket IE and NVD yields unreadable pages.

Yes, compared to any contemporary desktop or laptop, web browsing at 640x480 is hardly state-of-the-art. But given the inherent limitations of the platform, I feel that they've provided a major advance in web browsing capability on a device with such a small form factor. They've definitely gone WAY beyond anything that Pocket IE can do, and for most uses, I haven't found NetFront to be much more than an incremental improvement over Pocket IE. Again, for both of those products, the portrait-only orientation is a HUGE shortcoming.

Anyway, guess what? I may not be browsing at 1280x1024 as on my desktop, but I can access EVERY site that I normally access with ThunderHawk, and do the things that I normally do with almost no horizontal scrolling. To me, that's serious web browsing on a device this small. Sure, some things are missing... the ability to use standard SIPs, cookies, etc. But I consider those to be reasonable compromises in order to be able to have readable web pages in the normal orientation on a Pocket PC. If you apply some realistic expectations to what can be accomplished on a Pocket PC, I consider this to be most impressive. If you don't, well, to each his or her own.

[Grey]

Well I seem to have found an answer to my question, it would seem that Net Front will only work with the first network card installed! :evil: Doesn't matter if the network card is in the PPC or not. Also it does not support Microsoft .NET Passport.

[mike6024]

Portable and effective web browsing on my Pocket PC is something that I use all the time. Thunderhawk is the only product that can provide a near PC-quality web browsing experience on the Pocket PC. If that's not worth $4 a month, then I guess you really don't value such an experience very much. If I have one less Mickey D's Extra Value meal per month, that pays for Thunderhawk, and Thunderhawk doesn't clog my arteries. :wink:

Subscription based pricing for Thunderhawk is necessary because you're not really buying a piece of client software, you're buying an ongoing service. Bitstream processes web pages through their own servers to provide the exceptional clarity of the images Thunderhawk provides. That's a fundamental part of the design of Thunderhawk, it's what makes it special. And, guess what? Nobody provides Bitstream with free server hardware and administration. So they have the "audacity" to charge for the ongoing use of their servers. To call it "evil" just because it's a subscription is unfair, in my opinion. If it was just software, I'd agree, but that's not the case.

I'm sorry, I didn't realize it had to go through the servers. I thought it was more like how Microsoft wants to start charging subscription prices for standalone apps like Word. Ok, this isn't as evil then.

[JonnoB]

Well I seem to have found an answer to my question, it would seem that Net Front will only work with the first network card installed! :evil: Doesn't matter if the network card is in the PPC or not. Also it does not support Microsoft .NET Passport.

If true, that is bad, bad, bad.... I access the internet with my Pocket PC via mobile phone (socket CF data cable), CF WiFi, CF ethernet, and via cradle.