At OSNews we are interested to see how many people are using our special version of OSNews (no nested tables, no ads but still *full-featured* version, screenshots here and here) that is able to browse on “lesser” browsers. In the following polls, please vote and let us know if you are generally using an HTML-capable web browser with your PDA or your mobile phone.Note: The polls are now closed. Thank you for participating.
Nah, I never use Internet on my mobile phone.
how ’bout i would use it if my service provider didn’t charge additional service charges on top of airtime minutes to use it? i think a serious barrier to these types of advanced services is the fees involved…
Yeah, that’s why you get some kinda of call your “buddy free deal”
of course your “buddies” mobile it hooked up to some kinda dial in RAS box at home linked up to you ADSL. Add a Linux based PABX for calls at fixed line prices and to enable people to call your mobile from you home phone number.
Of course I am still dreamimg about acutally setting this up but maybe one day…
I read osnews.com on my Sony Clie NX80 with Sony’s $150 wifi card… =P It looks great in NetFront…
>It looks great in NetFront…
thanks.
I saw a screenshot of NetFront 3.0 on PocketPC (linked from the story) and indeed it looks great. NetFront also offers its browser to PalmOS and some higher-end mobile phones too btw. It seems to be a good browser (I think it has no JS, but it does have CSS). Judging from some shots I’ve seen, NetFront renders sites better than PocketIE.
I live in one of the highest mobile phone penetration Country of the European Comunity EC/CE. Almost nobody here uses his/her mobile phone to browse the web.
That would be crazy … when you can browse the web at the nearest Municipal house or Caffé to read email at hotmail on the go.
I could send a web address by SMS, though.
My phone has a browser that is a [o-q]ain in the harse and it’s too slow (I tried Yahoo and OSNews).
Nah, I never use Internet on my mobile phone.
Me too. And WAP was a total disgrace.
Chicobaud, what browser your mobile phone has, and which version exactly? Please check its About box. Also, what model phone do you use?
Kidding. How difficult is it to run all these special services for mobile phones, etc? If not enough people are using them, are you planning to stop?
Not really, but I am curious to know how many people are using such devices and browsers.
The special service comes pretty much “for free” development-wise for me. I just check the browser’s user agent and then I have a different header file if the browser is in the mobile/lesser browser category, or if it is a desktop browser. I have carefully designed the layout of OSNews to make sure that mobile browsers (using the simpler header file that does not create nested tables and has no ads) will render fine most of the time.
If you spoof your desktop browser (e.g. OmniWeb and Konqueror are easy to spoof) as “w3m” or “lynx” you should be able to see the faster/simpler version of OSNews. Please note that the OSNews subscribers see yet another version of the header file, which is as simple and fast-loading as the mobile header version, but it looks better and is more elegant and compact.
Here are the three header files I am using to make it work (and it works exceptionally well
Normal header: http://www.osnews.com/header.php?homepage=1&pricegrabber=1
Subscriber’s header: http://www.osnews.com/header-CLEAN.php
Mobile/text browser header: http://www.osnews.com/header-text.php
My phone is WAP 2.0 compatible. Since WAP 2.0 is a subset of XHTML, what option should I answer ? :p
I just don’t see the point, plus I hate using land lines anyway. And the sheer ignorant lack of even the most basic etiquette that I’ve seen from some cell users is just appalling.
Thank you, pal, for picking the table next to me at the cafe to have your cell conversation at. Oh, and cause it’s a cell and it’s outdoors and there’s noise from traffic and wind, make sure you talk extra loud so as to ruin any chance of me concentrating on my book.
Next time, I’m taking out my laptop, firing up some Refused MP3s, and playing them at max volume.
I sometimes use Opera on my Sharp Zaurus PDA to view this site. I’m using it right now. It works very well.
How can I use the osnews pda site shown in the picture on may Zaurus (Opera 5)? Just enter the osnews webadress and then it will display the special version? Or is there a special URL for this page?
I have a Nokia 7100 (pictured in the “Deck-It WML Previewer 1.2.3” window) but I have as yet never used it for WAP. Mainly because I’m never in a situation where I’m not at a PC from which I can access the web, so I have no need to use it =)
Maybe, if I ever have a need for a PDA…
Although this will be a must-have feature very soon, I don’t and won’t use internet on my mobile phone unless I ever use e-trade thing to buy and sell SCO stocks. I think my cell phone has a browser, but I haven’t even checked it. I want my phone to be simple. If there is no additional charge for internet connection, I might use it once in a while.
I don’t browse on my PDA either, but if and when I get a Zaurus or new Sony PDA with landscape display, I may use it and download a bunch of porn files. … wait, PDA doesn’t have a hard drive, does it?
I believe mobile web device and service is somewhat behind in the US (where I live) compared to Europe and Asia (Japan in particular). I will wait until it becomes ready for masses.
I use my phone to access the web all the time and I guess you could say I use my pda to access the web all the time too because I have one of those combo things (i330). The phone plan I have is nice, too, because we get unlimited “Sprint PCS Vision” (meaning web, messages, etc). I might be quite the geek, but recently when I went to see a movie with one of my friends one of the actresses in the movie looked familiar so we looked up her past movies from the theater on imdb.org via my phone. You have to admit that’s pretty cool.
My only complaint is that it’s so slow right now and the access seems to go through cycles. Sometimes I’ll be able to connect and it’ll stay connected even when I don’t want it to and sometimes it’ll connect but the connection will die a couple seconds later while loading a web page or checking email.
well – my mobile phone is also a pda -> nokia communicator
I use a Microsoft Smartphone (Windows powered). Not only can I use it to browse the web (not all that practical considering it’s display size) it also syncs up with Microsoft Exchange (MIS) so I always have up-to-date email, calender, tasklist, etc. (GPRS) Very usefull when on the road a lot! Besides this it also plays games, my own software, MSN messenger (wooaaah!) and does all the regular phone stuff (SMS, MMS, etc.).
It is a cross over between a PDA and a phone with the focus being more one the phone end; you can completly use it with one hand and it does not come with a stylus.
I keep hearing about people using SprintPCS in the US with this flat fee for data connections. I’d be using my phone on the net everytime I am in a public transportation if it wasn’t soooo expensive. If I could pay say 20$ a month for unlimited (or nearly traffic) I’d certainly do it. Not to mention all the mobile games that would become possible.
Gohl, you just go to http://www.osnews.com with opera 5 on your Zaurus and it detects you’re using a PDA and gives you the cut-down front page. You can still fully participate in discussions and voting on the site. I got a Netgear compact-flash WiFi card and use my Zaurus to surf the web from anywhere in the house, the garden, or down the street. It saves having to turn a PC on if all I want to do is look up a fact on Google, or check to see if any new stories are posted here 😉
…like ‘only when incredibly bored and sitting in a restaurant waiting’
or
‘only when really desperate to find soemething like stuck in traffic in a city you’re unfamiliar with’
as far as day to day use, no, never use it. but in those situations, i find myself attempting to read OSNews on a Treo or looking up something in mapquest (doesn’t work)
It looks to me like there are 4 different “headers” for the site then:
– Normal
– Subscriber’s
– WAP browser
– PDA/Text browser
On my Nokia 6310i, I can read the headlines, but nothing else. I don’t often look at OSNews.com with that though. Usually, I’ve got my PDA with me and here’s a screenshot of what it looks like on a Zaurus with Opera 5:
http://www.sorn.net/linux/zaurus/osnews.php
It’s not quite as nice as either of the Pocket PC screenshots that Euginia made. Opera on the Zaurus still seems to think it’s got more horizontal space than it really has.
I’ve never had that problem with other sites in Opera on the Zaurus though. My personal homepage and my Linux Users Group homepage render perfectly on it.
Actually with a clean and semantic web site designed with XHTML Strict there would be no need for a second version of OSNews. It would be directly accessible for such small devices.
Well, I suggest that you give it a try. Keep the same layout. Keep the nested fixed-width tables, the 468×60 and 120×600 ads, and you’ll see that the problem is not with the lack of XML well-formedness. And you’ll even see that you can’t actually get the site to look right on all the browsers where it currently does.
I’m not kidding. Eugenia has years of HTML experience, it’s just impressive to see her working on markup. And I barely overstate anything when I say that every tag on this site has been lovingly hand-tuned.
Well using Sony Ericsson’s P800 mobile phone and the port of Opera to that platform I can even view the full-blown version of OSNews in a format that’s perfectly readable… I must say the guys at Opera did an amazing job with this mobile browser !
>It looks to me like there are 4 different “headers” for the site then:
>- Normal
>- Subscriber’s
>- WAP browser
>- PDA/Text browser
No. The wap site is completely different, it is not just a header change. The WAP site is just WAP (only headlines are given) and is accessible only on http://wap.osnews.com/
>On my Nokia 6310i, I can read the headlines, but nothing else.
Yes, this is normal. WAP is a pretty f***ed up protocol and it works on some phones while it doesn’t on others. So we keep the minimum of pages and information through it, so it doesn’t break some buggy phones.
>Usually, I’ve got my PDA with me and here’s a screenshot of what it looks like on a Zaurus with Opera 5:
Thanks for the shot! Indeed, our code detects Opera and gives it the mobile version of the site, but Opera itself does not run on as a mobile version. This is why you see the scrollbars. For a browser to be called “mobile” should have a “small screen rendering” feature. Opera does have one (check your preferences) but from what I heard, it is a really bad implementation.
>It’s not quite as nice as either of the Pocket PC >screenshots that Euginia made. Opera on the Zaurus still >seems to think it’s got more horizontal space than it >really has.
Yup. Look above why. A real mobile browser would have nicely take advantage of SSR.
Ok, I changed the front page (for now) to set the width to 100% so Opera and PocketIE should now work without scrollbars. Can you please try again with your Zaurus and tell me if you get scrollbars now in the front page? Thx!
And won’t use it even if the phone would allow… (which it doesn’t and fits well in the bill…)
I’ve a mobile to make and receive phone calls… the rest is history… or marketspeak…
The version of Opera shown above isn’t exactly current. Let me give you up to date screenshots that take Eugenia’s changes into account:
http://www.pixelmedius.com/opera6default.png – default screen, Opera 6. I’m using TheKompany.com’s Rom, which incorporates a ton of improvements to what Sharp has done. Notice how much better the text looks.
http://www.pixelmedius.com/rotatefront.png – Using the Rotate plugin, I can rotate the screen to give me a much better browsing experience. I don’t know if the Pocket PC has this functionality (it didn’t the last time I looked, but that was a long time ago) but it certainly offers a lot of advantages with browsing, email and movie watching.
http://www.pixelmedius.com/rotateoperassr.png – Opera builds in their own little “no formatting mode”. It basically strips most of the formatting stuff and leaves the meat. For reading things like groups.google.com, etc, and forumes, it’s a great feature. This screenshot is also rotated (obviously).
Thank you Jason and Sandy for the Zaurus screenshots.
Indeed, after I did the changes to make the tables WIDTH=100%, Opera now does not show scrollbars, but unfortunately, it does not respect the icon cell width (which is hardcoded to 42 pixels — I want it to stay that way). So, we lost the scrollbars, and we got a terribly ugly and big icon cell…
It looks like it would be a pain to try to do anything accept call on the mobile phone.
i don’t own (never have) a mobile. when they can do ssh and full terminal emulation then maybe…
t
Jason, Sandy, please retry now. I made a change again (a hack really, it will probably break other mobile browsers
) to make sure that the icon cell is not taking 50% of the width, while it is asked to only get 42pix.
I view osnews on my t-mobile sidekick all the time. However, it sucks that the polls require javascript, because the sidekick doesn’t support it.
That looks great!
http://www.pixelmedius.com/newfront.png
>I view osnews on my t-mobile sidekick all the time.
Yup, T-Mobile’s Sidekick is also supported and it renders very nicely the last time I checked. But I made some changes today on the code because of Opera’s bugs, could you try again on your SideKick and tell me if it renders still ok? Thx!
Eugenia, netfront _has_ javascript and java support
There is simply nothing on the internet so import or so intriguing that it can’t wait until I get home.
Damn expensive too
WAP2 is HTML over HTTP, regardless of how your phone manufacturer or carriers tries to pitch it to you. None of that WAP stuff except in the name.
Betcour, what phone do you have?
I have a SE T610. I have developped “web” pages for it, however the thing has many many limitations on XHTML (many tags are not supported, and the browser won’t handle anything slightly off-spec gracefully and will just choke). The WAP 2.0 browser in there is way too sensitive to be fed any generic XHTML page.
After Eugenia made those changes, it works very well in Opera 5 on the Zaurus too. Looks almost as good as Opera 6.
http://www.sorn.net/misc/osnews3.png
Does anyone know if it’s possible to Install Opera 6 without OpenZaurus on this device? I don’t have a compact flash memory card, so can’t upgrade the OS.
Sandy, I made another small change after you got that shot, so now Opera doesn’t squash the icons… Unfortunately, Opera has some buggy code in that table code and going around their bug with hacks to fix it (without breaking the other browsers) is really hard.
My only advice to you would be to spring the ten bucks for a 32 meg card on ebay. Then you can upgrade your rom to 3.10 or thekompany’s rom, giving you all these handy features.
Yes, I often access OSNEWS via a H/PC (Handheld PC) running Windows CE 3, but I also use a Windows 2K terminal server client on the device so I actually get all the benefits of IE6 when doing this (being a virtual session).
“Yes, I use a web browser with my bluetooth PDA”
its just crappy because the browsers use proxies. so, its impossible to view your local apache or internal servers.
Sometimes I use a certain non-standard browser on the PC, on which OSNews also shows it’s simple version.
its just crappy because the browsers use proxies. so, its impossible to view your local apache or internal servers.
I use a WiFi card with my PDA, so it appears as part of my local network, then use a browser that uses real websites (instead of a cut-down version like Avant-Go). I sometimes preview web pages that I write using my PDA and an Apache server running on my desktop machine. I’m sure you’ll be able to find a browser app that doesn’t REQUIRE a proxy.
both on my mobile phone and on my PDA!
T-Mobile unlimited GPRS helps out a lot
I’ve been working on a WML portal, that’s both easy to use, and gives you content.
I call it WaPortal – Wireless Access Portal. If OSNews wants to use it or mess around with it for their needs, let me know. [email protected]
You can see a DEMO here: http://www.mcarterbrown.com/index.wml
And you can obviously also hook it up to any database, etc. But there is a message board, multiple chat rooms, etc. It’s still in the Beta stanges, and not finished… But that’s a taste.
Carter
first started with my Newton MP2100u – browsing with an ethernet card and a combination of Newt’s Cape, LunaSuite and NetHopper. Slow, and not much modern HTML support. But it worked great to have it fetch pages before I caught the bus for school/work.
Then, I got an iPAQ 3150. Never had any CF network card, but I did copy HTML onto CF cards. Then, I got my JOrnada 720- a really nice machine for browsing the web. Much better browsing experience- a better IE- than you get with PocketPC 2k and 2k2. Should be better in 2k3 though, although you still have a tiny screen. The J720 was my main computer at home for around a year. Great lil machine.
Then I got a Zaurus SL-5500… Sucked ass as a PDA, but as a 240×320 web browser, Opera 5 and then 6 as well as Konq ruled. Very fast rendering with a wifi card or using the usbnet, allowing my iBook to run NAT. But, it had too many failings, and I sold it. Went to using a Dell Axim X5 Basic for a while (I won it!) but sold that as well.
Now I’m back with the Zaurus, using a SL-C760, and with the bigger screen, I sense that this will be my new computer on which I’ll do most of my browsing at home. Still have to get a wifi card, all in good time… The usbnet thing works very well, browses very fast.
the real issues with the wireless web are latency, restricted content, poor input devices, and pricing. I never it on mine (sprint PCS) because i think the experience kind of sucks.
1) latency. regardless of the actual speed its going to feel slow because the latency on WCDMA, CDMA2000, and GPRS/EDGE networks is generally 300-500 ms. That is a result of dropped packets, a crap MAC, and conversions/filters.
2) not all of those services let you go out on the real internet, as least from your phone. You have to use the recreated internet which kind of sucks
3) using a numerical pad to input stuff sucks. Digit wireless has a nice solution.
4) pricing is obscene and it has to be, unless the network is totally underused (as is the case with voice stream/tmobile in the states). The cost per megabit is crazy. That is the fault of the inefficient network. Those networks (WCDMA, CDMA2000, and GPRS/EDGE) were simply not made to carry data efficiently. They were made for voice.
sony is being smart with their PDAs. WiFi is a better bet to encourage data use and you can use it in your home too.
>>It looks great in NetFront…
>thanks.
>I saw a screenshot of NetFront 3.0 on PocketPC (linked from >the story) and indeed it looks great. NetFront also offers >its browser to PalmOS and some higher-end mobile phones too >btw. It seems to be a good browser (I think it has no JS, >but it does have CSS). Judging from some shots I’ve seen, >NetFront renders sites better than PocketIE.
My Clie NX80 runs Palm OS 5. I haven’t seen many mobile enabled sites, but osnews.com looks great. NetFront does have CSS and JavaScript. And yes, NF renders much better than PocketIE (I had a PPC a while back)…
And yes, NF renders much better than PocketIE (I had a PPC a while back)…
It had better! PocketIE blows, at least the PIE that you get with PPC 2k and 2k2. Which is sad- there are better version of IE for WinCE, for instance on vanilla WinCE 3.0 and the newer 4.x (WinCE.NETs). On my Jornada 720, running H/PC 2000 based on Windows CE the version of IE (called “Internet Explorer”, not PocketIE) was about feature equivalent to IE 4.5- a very capable browser. It did VBScript, JavaScript, and even Java applets. Not sure about CSS though.