Comments on: PalmSource Ships New Browser to Licensees
PalmSource's browser will work with almost any type of connection to the Internet, including traditional dial-up connections and wireless networking. Web pages are rendered in their entirety on the handheld just as they would be on a desktop browser. For slower connections, users can disable images to speed up downloads. The browser has been optimized to run on ARM-based processors for maximum rendering speed.
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RE: Page rendering
RE: Page rendering
What about Hi-Res+
Just my 2 cents worth...
RE: What about VGA
David
RE: What about Hi-Res+
As wireless handheld devices become more popular, websites will become less resolution-and-color-dependent, because people will demand navgiation models and content formatting that meets their browsers. As XHTML slowly takes over the web this will start to become a reality.
RE: What about Hi-Res+
An idea yes. The problem is that 160x160 and 320x320 don't scale well to VGA. You'd have some of the dithering that can be seen in some situations on a Handera 330 scales a 160x160 app to it's QVGA 240x320 screen. Having said that, HandEra's screen scales quite well to 640x480. For that reason, you're more likely to see vga screens on PocketPC's (which share the same 240x320 screen resolution) and future HandEra and Symbol PDA's (if both of the latter stick with their QVGA roots).
On a Sony/Palm devices the screen would be 640x640 or 640x800 with virtual silk screen collapsed.
RE: What about Hi-Res+
RE: What about Hi-Res+
Designing a good web site is a lot harder than that. Take this site, for example. A PDA version of the home page should leave out the side bar (replaced with links to just the most important parts of the site - reviews, discussion, etc.). The "Special Deals" section should be left out altogether. The ads should be left out altogether. The logo should either be left out (and replaced with the name of the site in text or a smaller version of the logo). You can't do it all with CSS. You have to think about it and design each version on their own. There's no magic solution to this that will automagically reformat a site for two different platforms.
Scott
RE: What about Hi-Res+
RE: What about Hi-Res+ what about QVGA
RE: What about Hi-Res+
Here's a nickel, go buy yourself a calculator. Sony devices with virtual graffiti minimized would scale from 320x480 to 640x960, not 640x800.
And for all the HandEra bigots out there, it makes absolutely NO difference if you force people to scale "now" (e.g. apps designed for palm's 160x160 screen forced into HandEra's 320x240 QVGA) or scale "later" (e.g. apps designed for palm's 160x160 screen easily pixel doubled to Sony's original 320x320, but then forced to scale to 640x480). The scaling factor is the same in either case.
RE: What about Hi-Res+
RE: What about Hi-Res+
Yawn. Where do these children come from. The 330 is noticably smaller and lighter than any PDA I am aware of with equivalent features, so brick is wrong. There are still zero other Palm OS PDAs with anywhere near the number of features on the 330, so moving to another current Palm OS device would be a step backwards for most 330 users.
Oh well, I shouldn't have even wasted my time responding to these trolls.
I would assume the browser is coded to support any resolution, if the people doing it had any smarts whatsoever. There's nothing in OS 5 keeping them from doing it. Won't work on OS 3 or 4 devices anyhow, so this whole discussion is moot.
OS5 devices coming!
one has to wonder
how does it implement mouseovers? :)
seriously though, depending on browser detection, some sites may see that you support > javascript 1.2 and not give the normal non-fancy navigation. Maybe they thought of that and made 1 tap mouseover, double tap == single click, and triple tap == double click (very rarely used in the web).
Just one example, there are undoubtedly other concerns when displaying the real web on such a small and different device.
RE: one has to wonder
A rewrite of the OS that requires new hardware whose results will look the same as the old OS will NOT SELL HANDHELDS!
Palm is doomed!
K
RE: one has to wonder
RE: one has to wonder
http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_Story.asp?ID=3113
Its there ... lurking ... waiting.
RE: Overclocking
no proxy
Also, pages that have long javascripts (that can mean up to 10 Kb of data) have them removed by the proxy. True, you couldn't do any good with the javascript in blazer anyways... but I'm really concerned about this. It could become much more expensive to use GPRS connections...
-------------- huggy ---------------
RE: no proxy
---
News Editor
RE: no proxy
Real web browsing won't catch on until an unlimited wireless connection is $20 a month and reliably faster than 56Kbps, not just sometimes faster.
RE: no proxy
You're problem there is that avantgo isn't a direct browser. It's proxy based. Other Palm browsers that are proxy-less are hampered by the amount of work they have to do on the slowish processor. BUT compare Blazer to Eudora Web, and there's no contest. Eudora is the fastest non-proxy browser bar none. It's imageless and doesn't try to do all the processing of the others. It's a just the facts browser, and over a 14.4k cellphone link, or 802.11b link, faster even than web clipping (which is hampered by a slow connection speed).
Eudora will also save you on your GPRS connection as it won't download the images. Perhaps images might also be turn offable in the new Palm Browser. Regardless this browser running on OS5 hardware will have the power it needs to do the processing that slows current proxy-less browsers.
RE: no proxy
Making some grand assumptions in that post. I use Eudora Web nearly daily over 14.4k QNC CDMA connection. It's fast, and *very* usable. Oh, and pricing? Currently $5/mo unlimited.
RE: no proxy
RE: no proxy
RE: no proxy
Are you sure about this? I'm pretty sure you can only point the AvantGo client to a local proxy server in order to reach their proxy server. Trying to browse pages on a LAN webserver won't work under AvantGo.
NetFront browser review (Pocket PC version)
http://infosync.no/news/2002/n/2252.html
My understanding is that PalmSource has required a lot of tweaking of this product for their device, so not all of the comments on the browser UI and features would apply, although I'd guess the actualy browser window would be very similar.
--
Ben Combee, CodeWarrior for Palm OS technical lead
Programming help at www.palmoswerks.com
Tables
RE: Tables
Hotmail?
One minor, but still annoying problem that I've had in the 2+ years I've been getting online with a Palm, is that the inability to check my (spam-filled) Hotmail account. Blazer, Avantgo, Eudora, etc all are unable to access hotmail's inbox. I know most WAP cell phone browsers can do it, so I think it's more of a "MS wants to exclude everyone" thing than a particular technical hurdle.
P.S. mail2wap.com works amazingly well on the Palm for reading your pops e-mail accounts--I've recommended it to tons of people and the only one it couldn't handle was, surprise surprise, MSN POP e-mail !
Finally, how will this thing be sold? Downloadable for $20 ala Blazer? Bundled with the new OS5 units? Or just with the wireless ones?
RE: Hotmail?
thats because MS has a WAP portal for hotmail. WAp of course, is actually the least cabable 'WEB' method as it cannot read WEB pages at all - just WML/HDML stuff.
RE: Hotmail?
OS5
--Devan--
www.tavern.2ya.com
Palm OS apps, news, reviews and such
RE: OS5
This is a lot like the chicken and the egg thing...
Various ramblings
1) I think this was a reaction to business users concerns about security more than anything else. From a security standpoint, I'm guessing that many customers didn't want their "sensitive" data passing through anyone else's proxy server.
2) As far as this browser vs. a proxy-based browser like Blazer, the idea of browsing existing web sites (which are typically designed for 800-pixel wide screens), each has its advantages/disadvantages. Blazer will be faster but will largely make the site look awful. This, theoretically, will keep the site looking as it should but will be dog slow and will require a lot of side scrolling. Nevertheless, I think it's surprising (and disappointing) that Palm didn't make an attempt at providing a "fit-to-screen" mode.
Here's what I've been saying (and will continue to say): There's no such thing as a magical PDA browser which will format a web site designed for 800-pixel wide screens into a 320-pixel wide format while making it all look good. If you want your side to work well on a PDA, design a separate PDA-version of it. To the user who stated that the original designers of the web never meant for HTML to be used to design sites formatted for screen size. That's a great purist's view, but it's unrealistic. The web wouldn't be as popular as it is today, if all the sites out there looked as drab as Jakob Nielsen's useit.com site. In contrast, my prediction for the future is one where the designers will create multiple versions of their site for different screen formats. If the content of your site is database-driven, this isn't as cumbersome as it sounds.
Scott
RE: Various ramblings
imho
RE: Various ramblings
Anyone who wants to happily serve handheld users will either use a database-driven system or will manually create two versions of their pages. No technology (other than tiny 800-pixel-wide screens) will magically squeeze an 800-pixel-wide page down to a lower resolution without mucking it up.
Scott
RE: Various ramblings
Hey Ed, isn't PIC database driven? Aren't most of the ASP/JSP websites in the world database driven??
I worked in the JSP/Servlet/Bean type world (now a project mgr), and produced content formatted for desktop browsers, imode, WAP (in flavours for Nokia, Ericsson, and Openwave - and preferences set to diferent phone capability), PQA/WCA, IM (yep, instant messenger), as well as VXML. Content was the same, presentation was different, and largely template based.
This is not rocket science, but it does go a step or two beyond a basic *.HTML page produced with FrontPage.
RE: Various ramblings
RE: Various ramblings
--
Ben Combee, CodeWarrior for Palm OS technical lead
Programming help at www.palmoswerks.com
Does this new browser works on Palm OS 4.1 ???
But this browser I would like to see in my handheld!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martins
http://palmzz.times.lv
RE: Does this new browser works on Palm OS 4.1 ???
There are web browsers available for OSv4.1, like Blazer:
www.handspring.com/software/blazer_overview.jhtml
RE: Does this new browser works on Palm OS 4.1 ???
What's the deal?
It's taken as "new" just because it was included in the OS.
What they should really work on is to give a wireless solution, a browser is nothing if the user can not connect to Internet easily without spending extra $300 ~ $400 to buy add-on devices and sign up for service contracts.
RE: What's the deal?
Last I heard on this site, it sounded like Palm's first OS 5 device has Bluetooth built-in.
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Page rendering
Admit it, having to left and right and up and down is going to get old REAL QUICK...