Menneisyys
06-07-2006, 11:51 AM
Webby is a new Pocket Internet Explorer add-on to allow for multi-page browsing, file/page downloading, Web page source viewing, link address copying, full screen viewing (useful under pre-Windows Mobile 5 operating systems) and RSS feed management/subscription. It relies on the free .NET Compact Framework 2.0 from Microsoft. (Please read this article (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=757&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) on installation tips/download URL’s if you don’t have the latter on your device.)
After publishing my last review of the 2.0.x series of (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=652&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) Webby, some major improvements have been done to Webby and the version number bumped to 2.5. As many users have reported dramatic speed increase, I’ve decided to review the latest version (build 2.5.0.5), released on the 2nd of June.
The homepage of the application is here (http://www.users.tpg.com.au/lordf/anoriginalidea/). The comparison of the different (unregistered/registered Webby Mobile and Webby Pro) versions of Webby can be found here (http://www.users.tpg.com.au/lordf/anoriginalidea/WebbyRegister.htm) (note that the chart is not entirely up-to-date: for example, even the unregistered Webby Mobile supports four Microbrowsers).
Note that, in this article, I use either PIE or PIE/IEM to refer to Pocket Internet Explorer, the built-in, not very capable Web browser shipped with all Pocket PC’s. Its original, pre-Windows Mobile 5 (WM5) name was Pocket Internet Explorer (hence the PIE); in WM5, it has been renamed to Internet Explorer Mobile (IEM for short).
Executive summary
The commercial Webby Pro, in my opinion, may be worth the price tag for users with specific needs (for example, on Pocket PC’s that have a very limited number of hardware buttons). In my opinion, alternate browsers and other Pocket Internet Explorer plug-ins, while having comparable price points, are, when all their capabilities and their speed are considered, generally better (they have on-screen tabs, hardware button support and, in general, are considerably faster). The latest Webby version is, however, already their worthily contender, albeit still a bit slower / more awkward to use (no on-screen tabs, no hardware button support, no context menus).
The free Webby Mobile may be a really nice add-on to PIE for users that don’t want at all to pay anything for any browser (add-on).
Personal opinion – now that I know how it compares to the alternative browsers, will I stick to using it?
Nope, my favourite Web browser (plug-in), on my WM5 HP iPAQ hx4700 and HTC Wizard (the two Pocket PC's I use the the most for Web browsing), are still Opera Mobile 8.60 and, for Flash/Java applet sites, the PIE + PIEPlus 2.0 combo. I do a lot of Web browsing on my Pocket PC’s and, therefore, I don’t consider the price of these two applications too high for my purposes.
Again, I’d like to emphasize the following: for users that don’t want to use these two, above-mentioned solutions because they don’t want to pay for any browser (both Opera Mobile and PIEPlus are commercial) or because of incompatibility problems with some Pocket PC models (Opera Mobile doesn’t run without problems on WM2003SE x50v's), the free Webby Mobile is a very good alternative/choice.
Now, for the good/bad.
The good
(Note that this and the following, ‘The Bad’ section is strongly built in on the information / remarks in my two past Webby reviews. You may wan to read them to get a picture of what the biggest problems were in the old versions.)
* The speed has indeed been considerably increased. Now, the standard test page (http://www.winmobiletech.com/072005BrowserRoundup/PPCMagTest/) is downloaded in about 44 seconds inside Webby, as opposed to about 38 seconds inside IEM (everything measured on my x51v). That is, the new version is indeed faster than the previous, 2.0.x ones. It’s, however, in no way as fast as PIE/IEM itself (with “real” PIE/IEM plug-ins like PIEPlus, Spb Pocket Plus and MultiIE) and is considerably worse (because of PIE/IEM’s being inherently slow) than that of (the fastest Pocket PC browsers) Opera Mobile or, to a lesser degree the second-fastest Pocket PC Web browser, NetFront.
Note that several Webby users have reported test page download times much better than even with Opera Mobile, the fastest (native – unlike the even faster, but midlet-based Opera Mini) Pocket PC application. The high transfer/rendering speed you can read in these reports are because, by default, Webby uses the Google Web microbrowser (see the View/Layout menu), which really reduces (to about one-tenth) the information transferred and, therefore, really increases the transfer and rendering speed. If you switch the rendering mode to either Off (the standard "fit to screen") or Desktop, then, no Web Microbrowser-based compression will take place. Then, Webby becomes, as one would expect, slightly slower than PIE/IEM itself.
* Open Link in new tab – this is something I’ve really missed from previous Webby versions. (See the reviews of them.)
* As before, you can save the contents of a link to a file (see View/Save to File… (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/webby25savetofile-1.bmp.png) and, then, choosing a link to be downloaded (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/webby25savetofile-2.bmp.png)). Unfortunately, only (the really buggy) ftxPBrowser supports the same functionality (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=466&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1), as far as alternate clients are concerned.
* Support for four Microbrowsers (that is, web-based Web compression / strip services): Skweezer, Google, MobileLeap and WebWarper. If you, however, take into account how easily the commercial MultiIE and PIEPlus can be configured to be passed a web page to be compressed, this doesn’t seem to be an clear advantage any more – only in the “free” program area: ftxPBrowser can’t do the same and, because it needs an additional midlet-runner environment to be run, you don’t necessarily want to use, no matter how good it is, the free Opera Mini (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=787&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1).
* Support for subscribing to/reading RSS feeds. Unfortunately, however, you’ll need to purchase the Pro version to be able to subscribe to more than three feeds. In this respect, the free and definitely faster Qmail is a much better choice – it has no restrictions at all and, because it hasn’t been written using the Compact Framework, is definitely faster at synchronizing RSS feeds.
* Support for gestures. They allow for shortcuts (similar to the – in Webby, missing – hardware button shortcuts present in MultiIE and PIEPlus) to access some functionality in a way that is meant to be (but, in reality, isn’t – at least in my opinion – really) faster than using the menus. To use them, you can either bring up (if it isn’t already open) the standard Block or Letter Recognizer Software Input Panel (SIP) of the operating system and use the stylus to draw a line (or lines) to control Webby. If you don’t want to use Block/Letter Recognizer (because you use an external/built-in keyboard or the Keyboard/Transcriber/third-party SIP), just click the gesture icon, http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/GestureIconWebby.png, in the center of the horizontal scrollbar and draw the gestures on the (really convenient – it also displays the current gesture set-up) new dialog (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/GestureScreenWebby-1.bmp.png). It will, unlike the operating system SIP’s, allow for using the entire screen area. Also, as with the built-in OS SIP’s, it will display the gestures already drawn (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/GestureScreenWebby-2.bmp.png).
You can set up gestures in View/Options/Gestures (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/webby25gestureSetup-1.bmp.png). You can use any of gesture direction; they are referred to by their direction (Left/Right/Up/Down). The following functionality can be assigned to gestures: 1 (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/webby25gestureSetup-2.bmp.png), 2 (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/webby25gestureSetup-3.bmp.png)
* configurable pop-up killers (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25PopUpKiller.bmp.png): this is not present in other Web browsers or plug-ins either. There’re some kind of pop-up killers in, for example, NetFront 3.3 (see this screenshot (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/nf33PopUpKiller.bmp.png)), but they are in no way configurable. Unfortunately, you’ll need to pay for Webby Pro if you want a version that allows for blocking more than two/three (unregistered/registered Webby Mobile limitations) URL’s.
If you don’t want to pay for Webby pro’s unlimited adblocking capabilities, you may still want to consider sticking to alternative, online, proxy-based (and, therefore, fully usable from most Pocket PC Web browsers – all of them support proxies, except for Opera Mini) pop-up filtering solutions because, in general, they are much more powerful than that of Webby. There’re a lot of subscription-based, commercial online popup filters on the market. Alternatively, if you or a friend of you can run the free (!) and highly powerful RabbIT (http://www.khelekore.org/rabbit/), it also has a much better, much more configurable ad filtering module (in addition to other goodies like bandwidth reduction by GZIP compression, image downsampling support etc) than Webby. (You may want to read my RabbIT-related articles/stuff for example in my article on Web compression technologies – see the “Recommended links” section.)
* I’ve scrutinized the CPU usage of Webby to find out whether there’re any fatal bugs in there (for example, bugs like that of Adobe Acrobat Reader 2.0 (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=880&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1), many builds of the Minimo Pocket PC Web browser on some Pocket PC models (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=549&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) or RealDice games (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=862&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1)). Fortunately, there aren’t – there aren’t related bugs in Webby.
The bad
* Because of relying on the Compact Framework, it’s generally slower than “native” applications like Opera Mobile, NetFront or all the other PIE plug-ins (the current builds of Minimo are still slower).
* still no support for the One column mode of WM2003SE and WM5 PIE/IEM browsers. A big omission to everyone not wanting to use the Skweezer/ Google/ MobileLeap / WebWarper Web compression services for, say, compatibility reasons (some of these services, for example, completely strip all JavaScript code, Flash animations and/or don’t support SSL), but the built-in, highly useful one column mode.
* it still doesn’t have its own for example link context menus, unlike other plug-ins and/or standalone browsers. When, for example, you select Tabs/New Tab using Link… (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25NewTabUsingLink-1.bmp.png), you’re presented this dialog box (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25NewTabUsingLink-2.bmp.png) (the time it’s displayed can be set in the setup menu here) and, then, need to click the link you want to be opened in a new tab. While this is not very hard/slow to access, it is still radically different from the context menu-based solutions.
* Speaking of the WM5 PIE/IEM context menu, Full Screen (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25FullScreenInPIEContextMenu.bmp.png) doesn’t work. You need to go to View/ Full Screen (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25FullScreenInPIEContextMenu-2.bmp.png) to enable full screen (and to use the http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25OutofFullScreen.png icon to return from there). Yeah, this is minor annoyance – still, if you have used to the IEM context menu, it will surely annoy you.
* (Still) no support for hardware buttons. Taken into account that PIEPlus 2.0 has excellent and ftxPBrowser and MultiIE good support for hardware buttons (unfortunately, NetFront 3.3 and Opera Mobile don’t), this is a big letdown for Webby. Yes, it does support gestures (see “The Good” section), but they are a bit more awkward to use than dedicated hardware buttons – you will end up having to use the touchscreen, unlike with PIEPlus, ftxPBrowser or MultiIE.
* Unfortunately, there is no autocomplete here (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25NoAutoCompleteInEnterURL.bmp.png) – as opposed to, say, Opera Mobile (screenshot here (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/OpMobileAutoCompleteInEnterURL.bmp.png)). Also, while it has support for history (View/History), the list is static as can be seen in here (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25Histyro.bmp.png) (Fortunately, the history list in Go/Address (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25Histyro-2.bmp.png) does work.)
* There are no on-screen tabs for browser windows, unlike in most other solutions (except for Spb Pocket Plus and Opera Mini), which means you can’t quickly switch between different windows and, as has been pointed out, hardware buttons can’t be used either to do the same (see how PIEPlus, MultiIE or ftxPBrowser can be configured to do so!). Using Webby, you’ll always need to click Tabs, and, then, click the window name you want to switch to (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/webby25NoOnsreenTabs.bmp.png) – two taps instead of just one (or, just a button press to switch to the previous/next tab), if you don’t want to use the (also touchscreen-based) gestures.
* There’s no WM5 hotkey support at all: you will always need to use the touchscreen to do anything.
Is the Pro version worth the $12/$20?
Now that PIEPlus 2.0 (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=837&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) ($14.95), Opera Mobile 8.60 ($24) and NetFront 3.3 ($30) is out (the best alternate Web browser applications) and you can subscribe to cheap, proxy-based, online content filter services (if not run them for free on your own desktop PC – see RabbIT), I would still not call Webby Pro the best buy. These three applications (along with commercially available Web filters) all do what Webby Pro – just better, in almost every respect, except for the ability to directly download the contents of a link, gestures (I still say hardware buttons offer much easier usability than gestures), configurable pop-up killers (if you don’t subscribe to a filter proxy or run RabbIT) and the built-in RSS client.
The free and the freely registered version, on the other hand, may be really worth getting if you in no way would want to pay for another Web browser (add-on) or need the unique features of Webby. This is particularly true with WM5 users (ftxPBrowser, the other free alternative, is non-WM5-compliant) that don’t want to use the free Opera Mini (see this tutorial (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=644&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) on setting it up on the Pocket PC) because of it being based on midlets.
Recommended links
Link collection to the latest Pocket PC Web Browser reviews (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&title=link_collection_to_the_latest_pocket_pc&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1)
Everything you need to know about Skweezer, Google, MobileLeap and WebWarper (the Microbrowsers), RabbIT (compression/web filtering proxy) and the like (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=494&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) (see the links in there!)
After publishing my last review of the 2.0.x series of (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=652&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) Webby, some major improvements have been done to Webby and the version number bumped to 2.5. As many users have reported dramatic speed increase, I’ve decided to review the latest version (build 2.5.0.5), released on the 2nd of June.
The homepage of the application is here (http://www.users.tpg.com.au/lordf/anoriginalidea/). The comparison of the different (unregistered/registered Webby Mobile and Webby Pro) versions of Webby can be found here (http://www.users.tpg.com.au/lordf/anoriginalidea/WebbyRegister.htm) (note that the chart is not entirely up-to-date: for example, even the unregistered Webby Mobile supports four Microbrowsers).
Note that, in this article, I use either PIE or PIE/IEM to refer to Pocket Internet Explorer, the built-in, not very capable Web browser shipped with all Pocket PC’s. Its original, pre-Windows Mobile 5 (WM5) name was Pocket Internet Explorer (hence the PIE); in WM5, it has been renamed to Internet Explorer Mobile (IEM for short).
Executive summary
The commercial Webby Pro, in my opinion, may be worth the price tag for users with specific needs (for example, on Pocket PC’s that have a very limited number of hardware buttons). In my opinion, alternate browsers and other Pocket Internet Explorer plug-ins, while having comparable price points, are, when all their capabilities and their speed are considered, generally better (they have on-screen tabs, hardware button support and, in general, are considerably faster). The latest Webby version is, however, already their worthily contender, albeit still a bit slower / more awkward to use (no on-screen tabs, no hardware button support, no context menus).
The free Webby Mobile may be a really nice add-on to PIE for users that don’t want at all to pay anything for any browser (add-on).
Personal opinion – now that I know how it compares to the alternative browsers, will I stick to using it?
Nope, my favourite Web browser (plug-in), on my WM5 HP iPAQ hx4700 and HTC Wizard (the two Pocket PC's I use the the most for Web browsing), are still Opera Mobile 8.60 and, for Flash/Java applet sites, the PIE + PIEPlus 2.0 combo. I do a lot of Web browsing on my Pocket PC’s and, therefore, I don’t consider the price of these two applications too high for my purposes.
Again, I’d like to emphasize the following: for users that don’t want to use these two, above-mentioned solutions because they don’t want to pay for any browser (both Opera Mobile and PIEPlus are commercial) or because of incompatibility problems with some Pocket PC models (Opera Mobile doesn’t run without problems on WM2003SE x50v's), the free Webby Mobile is a very good alternative/choice.
Now, for the good/bad.
The good
(Note that this and the following, ‘The Bad’ section is strongly built in on the information / remarks in my two past Webby reviews. You may wan to read them to get a picture of what the biggest problems were in the old versions.)
* The speed has indeed been considerably increased. Now, the standard test page (http://www.winmobiletech.com/072005BrowserRoundup/PPCMagTest/) is downloaded in about 44 seconds inside Webby, as opposed to about 38 seconds inside IEM (everything measured on my x51v). That is, the new version is indeed faster than the previous, 2.0.x ones. It’s, however, in no way as fast as PIE/IEM itself (with “real” PIE/IEM plug-ins like PIEPlus, Spb Pocket Plus and MultiIE) and is considerably worse (because of PIE/IEM’s being inherently slow) than that of (the fastest Pocket PC browsers) Opera Mobile or, to a lesser degree the second-fastest Pocket PC Web browser, NetFront.
Note that several Webby users have reported test page download times much better than even with Opera Mobile, the fastest (native – unlike the even faster, but midlet-based Opera Mini) Pocket PC application. The high transfer/rendering speed you can read in these reports are because, by default, Webby uses the Google Web microbrowser (see the View/Layout menu), which really reduces (to about one-tenth) the information transferred and, therefore, really increases the transfer and rendering speed. If you switch the rendering mode to either Off (the standard "fit to screen") or Desktop, then, no Web Microbrowser-based compression will take place. Then, Webby becomes, as one would expect, slightly slower than PIE/IEM itself.
* Open Link in new tab – this is something I’ve really missed from previous Webby versions. (See the reviews of them.)
* As before, you can save the contents of a link to a file (see View/Save to File… (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/webby25savetofile-1.bmp.png) and, then, choosing a link to be downloaded (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/webby25savetofile-2.bmp.png)). Unfortunately, only (the really buggy) ftxPBrowser supports the same functionality (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=466&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1), as far as alternate clients are concerned.
* Support for four Microbrowsers (that is, web-based Web compression / strip services): Skweezer, Google, MobileLeap and WebWarper. If you, however, take into account how easily the commercial MultiIE and PIEPlus can be configured to be passed a web page to be compressed, this doesn’t seem to be an clear advantage any more – only in the “free” program area: ftxPBrowser can’t do the same and, because it needs an additional midlet-runner environment to be run, you don’t necessarily want to use, no matter how good it is, the free Opera Mini (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=787&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1).
* Support for subscribing to/reading RSS feeds. Unfortunately, however, you’ll need to purchase the Pro version to be able to subscribe to more than three feeds. In this respect, the free and definitely faster Qmail is a much better choice – it has no restrictions at all and, because it hasn’t been written using the Compact Framework, is definitely faster at synchronizing RSS feeds.
* Support for gestures. They allow for shortcuts (similar to the – in Webby, missing – hardware button shortcuts present in MultiIE and PIEPlus) to access some functionality in a way that is meant to be (but, in reality, isn’t – at least in my opinion – really) faster than using the menus. To use them, you can either bring up (if it isn’t already open) the standard Block or Letter Recognizer Software Input Panel (SIP) of the operating system and use the stylus to draw a line (or lines) to control Webby. If you don’t want to use Block/Letter Recognizer (because you use an external/built-in keyboard or the Keyboard/Transcriber/third-party SIP), just click the gesture icon, http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/GestureIconWebby.png, in the center of the horizontal scrollbar and draw the gestures on the (really convenient – it also displays the current gesture set-up) new dialog (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/GestureScreenWebby-1.bmp.png). It will, unlike the operating system SIP’s, allow for using the entire screen area. Also, as with the built-in OS SIP’s, it will display the gestures already drawn (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/GestureScreenWebby-2.bmp.png).
You can set up gestures in View/Options/Gestures (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/webby25gestureSetup-1.bmp.png). You can use any of gesture direction; they are referred to by their direction (Left/Right/Up/Down). The following functionality can be assigned to gestures: 1 (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/webby25gestureSetup-2.bmp.png), 2 (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/webby25gestureSetup-3.bmp.png)
* configurable pop-up killers (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25PopUpKiller.bmp.png): this is not present in other Web browsers or plug-ins either. There’re some kind of pop-up killers in, for example, NetFront 3.3 (see this screenshot (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/nf33PopUpKiller.bmp.png)), but they are in no way configurable. Unfortunately, you’ll need to pay for Webby Pro if you want a version that allows for blocking more than two/three (unregistered/registered Webby Mobile limitations) URL’s.
If you don’t want to pay for Webby pro’s unlimited adblocking capabilities, you may still want to consider sticking to alternative, online, proxy-based (and, therefore, fully usable from most Pocket PC Web browsers – all of them support proxies, except for Opera Mini) pop-up filtering solutions because, in general, they are much more powerful than that of Webby. There’re a lot of subscription-based, commercial online popup filters on the market. Alternatively, if you or a friend of you can run the free (!) and highly powerful RabbIT (http://www.khelekore.org/rabbit/), it also has a much better, much more configurable ad filtering module (in addition to other goodies like bandwidth reduction by GZIP compression, image downsampling support etc) than Webby. (You may want to read my RabbIT-related articles/stuff for example in my article on Web compression technologies – see the “Recommended links” section.)
* I’ve scrutinized the CPU usage of Webby to find out whether there’re any fatal bugs in there (for example, bugs like that of Adobe Acrobat Reader 2.0 (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=880&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1), many builds of the Minimo Pocket PC Web browser on some Pocket PC models (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=549&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) or RealDice games (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=862&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1)). Fortunately, there aren’t – there aren’t related bugs in Webby.
The bad
* Because of relying on the Compact Framework, it’s generally slower than “native” applications like Opera Mobile, NetFront or all the other PIE plug-ins (the current builds of Minimo are still slower).
* still no support for the One column mode of WM2003SE and WM5 PIE/IEM browsers. A big omission to everyone not wanting to use the Skweezer/ Google/ MobileLeap / WebWarper Web compression services for, say, compatibility reasons (some of these services, for example, completely strip all JavaScript code, Flash animations and/or don’t support SSL), but the built-in, highly useful one column mode.
* it still doesn’t have its own for example link context menus, unlike other plug-ins and/or standalone browsers. When, for example, you select Tabs/New Tab using Link… (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25NewTabUsingLink-1.bmp.png), you’re presented this dialog box (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25NewTabUsingLink-2.bmp.png) (the time it’s displayed can be set in the setup menu here) and, then, need to click the link you want to be opened in a new tab. While this is not very hard/slow to access, it is still radically different from the context menu-based solutions.
* Speaking of the WM5 PIE/IEM context menu, Full Screen (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25FullScreenInPIEContextMenu.bmp.png) doesn’t work. You need to go to View/ Full Screen (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25FullScreenInPIEContextMenu-2.bmp.png) to enable full screen (and to use the http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25OutofFullScreen.png icon to return from there). Yeah, this is minor annoyance – still, if you have used to the IEM context menu, it will surely annoy you.
* (Still) no support for hardware buttons. Taken into account that PIEPlus 2.0 has excellent and ftxPBrowser and MultiIE good support for hardware buttons (unfortunately, NetFront 3.3 and Opera Mobile don’t), this is a big letdown for Webby. Yes, it does support gestures (see “The Good” section), but they are a bit more awkward to use than dedicated hardware buttons – you will end up having to use the touchscreen, unlike with PIEPlus, ftxPBrowser or MultiIE.
* Unfortunately, there is no autocomplete here (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25NoAutoCompleteInEnterURL.bmp.png) – as opposed to, say, Opera Mobile (screenshot here (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/OpMobileAutoCompleteInEnterURL.bmp.png)). Also, while it has support for history (View/History), the list is static as can be seen in here (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25Histyro.bmp.png) (Fortunately, the history list in Go/Address (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/Webby25Histyro-2.bmp.png) does work.)
* There are no on-screen tabs for browser windows, unlike in most other solutions (except for Spb Pocket Plus and Opera Mini), which means you can’t quickly switch between different windows and, as has been pointed out, hardware buttons can’t be used either to do the same (see how PIEPlus, MultiIE or ftxPBrowser can be configured to do so!). Using Webby, you’ll always need to click Tabs, and, then, click the window name you want to switch to (http://www.winmobiletech.com/062006Webby25/webby25NoOnsreenTabs.bmp.png) – two taps instead of just one (or, just a button press to switch to the previous/next tab), if you don’t want to use the (also touchscreen-based) gestures.
* There’s no WM5 hotkey support at all: you will always need to use the touchscreen to do anything.
Is the Pro version worth the $12/$20?
Now that PIEPlus 2.0 (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=837&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) ($14.95), Opera Mobile 8.60 ($24) and NetFront 3.3 ($30) is out (the best alternate Web browser applications) and you can subscribe to cheap, proxy-based, online content filter services (if not run them for free on your own desktop PC – see RabbIT), I would still not call Webby Pro the best buy. These three applications (along with commercially available Web filters) all do what Webby Pro – just better, in almost every respect, except for the ability to directly download the contents of a link, gestures (I still say hardware buttons offer much easier usability than gestures), configurable pop-up killers (if you don’t subscribe to a filter proxy or run RabbIT) and the built-in RSS client.
The free and the freely registered version, on the other hand, may be really worth getting if you in no way would want to pay for another Web browser (add-on) or need the unique features of Webby. This is particularly true with WM5 users (ftxPBrowser, the other free alternative, is non-WM5-compliant) that don’t want to use the free Opera Mini (see this tutorial (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=644&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) on setting it up on the Pocket PC) because of it being based on midlets.
Recommended links
Link collection to the latest Pocket PC Web Browser reviews (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&title=link_collection_to_the_latest_pocket_pc&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1)
Everything you need to know about Skweezer, Google, MobileLeap and WebWarper (the Microbrowsers), RabbIT (compression/web filtering proxy) and the like (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=494&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) (see the links in there!)