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On my N82: spent some time with Opera Mini after a while – had been using Nokia’s built-in S60 Browser exclusively over  the past few months.

Here’s a list of peeves and loves about each browser.

 

Opera Mini Good

• Faster page load times
• Snappier controls
• Smoother scrolling
• Slightly better font rendering (all of above relative to S60 Browser)
• Address TLD auto-complete: (type www.opera. and  a drop-down list appears with opera.com, opera.org , opera.net)
• Speed Dial-like shortcuts for bookmarks

Opera Mini Bad

• No support for multiple tabs
• “Small” font too small, “Medium” too big
• Screen does not occupy entire width when phone tilted (in portrait mode). I don’t think the browser is accelerometer-aware
• Not possible to copy URL

S60 Browser Good

• Does not ask for permission to connect; allows selection of default access point. This is because, unlike Opera Mini, which is a Java app, the S60 browser is a native S60 app.
• Page overview – a shrunk view of the current page which you can quickly scroll around on.
• Attractive Back/Forward implementation. Page previews flip forward and back, like moving your mouse across the OS X dock.

S60 Browser Bad

• Supports multiple tabs but cannot open new one!
• No “top”, “bottom”, “pgup”, “pgdn” keypad shortcuts
• Tedious process to copy URL. Bookmark current page, navigate to Edit bookmarks, copy URL, delete bookmark.

What else

Haven’t had a chance to check out Skyfire yet; the founders have decided, in a sadly common blinkered move, to limit launch to the US. A mobile browser from Mozilla’s been “just around the corner” for a while now (and won’t show up on S60 first). Google’s promised a mobile version of Chrome, but my guess is that Android will get it before S60 does. I don’t see mobile Safari on S60 ever. And it hurts to even speak of mobile IE.

(This post began as a reply to a comment question on my previous blog post about iPhone 3G. It’s also a complete re-write of an earlier post.)

My experience with the Internet on my Nokia N82 has been more than satisfying, but that might well be a result of my usage pattern. Your mileage may vary. And yes, my ideal internet-access device would be iPhone, but I’ve already written about why iPhone is a no-no for me.

Email

During my commute, I process email I received the previous evening and overnight. Since the ride is frequently too bumpy to type fast, I avoid replying until I’m in my office (though I send the occasional one-sentence reply through the app). I use the Gmail App to label, star, archive and delete email.

Bulk processing email like this is faster on the Gmail App than it is on the desktop! The Gmail App has handy shortcuts (press 7 twice to delete, 8 twice to mark as spam and delete, 9 twice to archive, “*” to mark as star. It also pre-fetches email so you don’t wait for minutes on end for pages to load.

Feeds and updates

The Google Reader interface for iPhone works just as fine on the S60 browser. With prefetching, ability to star, share, share with notes, and mark entire feeds and folders as read, I can process feeds as fast on my phone as I can from my laptop. I also catch up on Twitter with the S60 browser. m.twitter.com is fast, and doesn’t feel like you’re compromising on the experience because you’re using a mobile-adapted interface.

Microblogging

The same S60 browser and m.twitter.com let me send tweets while on the go. I’d love to post via SMS, but the facility seems to be “unavailable temporarily” since May at least.

News

I use Google News India and the New York Times mobile page for Indian and World news respectively. Both sites have awesome mobile interfaces, and render very well on the S60 browser.

Incidentally, you can view pages either in landscape or portrait mode by just tilting the phone using the built-in accelerometer on the N82. I scan tweets in portrait mode and my feeds and news in landscape mode.

Social Networking

A few months ago, Google release a mobile-adapted interface for Orkut. Like all of Google’s mobile services, Orkut mobile is simple and well-designed, with support for viewing profiles, photos, scrapbooks, birthday reminders and activity updates – all of what you’d use on the web. I don’t see much support for communities or applications, and I’d prefer it stay that way. I don’t like Orkut’s implementation of either.

Instant Messaging

I’m not a big fan of instant messaging, and certainly not one of those who’s online but “Busy” all day long. If I do have to ping someone on Google Talk, though, Fring is the app I use. The competition (apart from Ebuddy) tends to be either horribly designed or terribly engineered. Or both. Fring lacks notification on the phone’s front screen (For Nokia, I can imagine using Active Standby to display “New IM from so-and-so”. Google’s managed it with their Search Box).

It’s also a VoIP client. Rohan writes in: “My phone is WiFi-enabled and I have a Skype unlimited connection. I’ve configured Skype within Fring, so when I connect my mobile through WiFi to the local LAN, I can make almost free voice calls (VoIP calls) to 32 countries using Skype on Fring.”

The Series 60 Browser

All of my mobile web access is now through the default vanilla yet stunningly capable S60 browser. It has support for multiple windows – invaluable for opening links to websites from Twitter, support for SSL (when I check Gmail from the browser), one-click zoom in/zoom out, and the mini-map feature – viewing the entire page, reduced, on your screen, and scrolling through it instead. Invaluable for scrolling through long pages.

What’s your mobile applications list? And how does it fit into your daily lifestyle?

Apple released Safari 3.1 today, and has claimed that it is “the world’s fastest browser”.

“Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers…”

Having used  it since it was first released last year on Windows, I think this is more than just twisted statistics. Forget those measurements (down to decimal points, for god’s sake), but Safari definitely feels faster than either Firefox or Opera. Safari’s UI needs a post to itself, but it puts both IE and Firefox to shame.

Apple could put more muscle behind promoting Safari on Windows (for reasons I outlined last June), but I don’t see it giving either Firefox or IE a serious run for their money. My prediction is that Safari’ll be locked in an inconsequential battle for third place with Opera (also a fast, snappy alternative).

IE will always be number 1 because it’s pre-installed with Windows (and is un-installable). The vast majority of the installed base won’t switch to anything else (both home and business users). IE’s good enough. ‘Nuff said.

Firefox is the poster boy of the power-user crowd because it’s so customizable. But there’s an upper cap to the market share it can gain (see IE above).

Safari’s USP is speed and simplicity. Speed isn’t enough for the IE crowd to switch. And Safari’s simplicity (which implies non-extensibility) is a deal-killer for the Firefox crowd. Opera faces the exact same problems.

Between these massive masses of users, both of whom have diametrically opposite views on what a browser should be, are the miniscule 4-5% who use either of Safari or Opera, regardless of how good/fast/simple/snappy they are. Pity.

Footnote: Hark back to my June 2007 article about why Apple wants Safari on Windows – it’s got to do with the iPhone. Opera, with its large mobile push, probably has the same strategy too.

I was reading a Fortune Magazine article on how Ray Ozzie is the vanguard of Microsoft’s new Internet Services strategy. It struck me that Microsoft realizes that we’re moving away from the desktop to the “webtop” paradigm, where your data resides in the “cloud” of the Internet, and that we’re moving towards fundamentally new services that leverage the power of the Web. In other words, MS seems to “get” the Internet of the future.

In fact, one of the tenets of the “new Web”, or Web 2.0, as it’s more popularly known, is that value is moving up the software stack, and that applications are now commodities; the real value lies in services that are offered via those applications. For instance, I’m writing this document on Writely, a sort of Wordpad-for-the-Web. Mind you, it isn’t an application in the traditional sense of the term, as much as it’s a service. In any case, the important thing here is that it doesn’t matter what browser application I’m using to access this document on Writely. I’m using Firefox, but I might as well have been using Internet Explorer. Or Opera. Or Safari. Or… well, you get the idea. The browser does not matter any more. It is a commodity. A lot of application “services” today run on the same principle. All of Google’s offerings: Search. Local. Maps. Gmail. Orkut. Blogger. Writely itself. Take a look at the hottest tech startups today. Flickr. del.icio.us. 37signals. YouTube. Digg. Bloglines. Spot the pattern? How you access the application services does not matter.

The browser is just the way we access the Internet today. What will matter is how we will access the Internet tomorrow. I’ve said this in the past, and I’ll say it again here. Google Desktop (GD) is the application to watch out for. The future will belong to what are known as Internet-connected widgets, or as MS calls them, Internet-connected components (ICC) . These will be used on desktops, mobile devices, and any other appliances that will be connected to the Web in the future. And GD is one application that uses these ICCs already. Almost every single plugin connects to the Internet to gather the data it needs. Or take a look at Konfabulator, deemed valuable enough to be bought by Yahoo!. These widgets are the future of how information and content on the Internet is going to be created and accessed. Taking it to the next level, imagine these widgets on your smartphone. Or in your TV/TiVo. Or in your car. That is the opportunity for ICCs.

So does MS need Internet Explorer?
The area we’ve talked about above is where MS’s future opportunities are. Ray Ozzie and his team have to find a business model to monetize this opportunity. That’ll require his deep technical insight. It’ll also require immense technical talent from within MS to build a programming model around the new Web. And here’s where I’m going to step in and make this assertion.

Microsoft should stop developing Internet Explorer.

Instead, it ought to concentrate on building the Internet into the very heart of the next Windows, whether it’s the successor to Windows Vista (for the desktop), or Windows Mobile (for mobile devices). Firefox is doing a better job than IE in every respect. It’s the better browser by far. Only Opera can come close to being as good. IE isn’t MS’s competitive advantage in the least, in many respects, it’s a liability. A wise move would be to cease development on the browser – any development on IE would be simply playing catch-up to Firefox and Opera. It makes no sense to compete in such a market when you’re better off building up tomorrow’s market. Microsoft needs to jump to (in the words of Guy Kawasaki) “the next curve”. Or in the words of John Sculley, “change the rules of the game”, as he did at the helm of Pepsi.

I sense that Windows Live is another mistake that the company’s making. Not the idea of web-enabled services – that’s fine by me. But the fact that Windows Live works best on IE and has problems with Firefox, Opera, Safari means that we’re going down the same path again – trying to “lock-in” users to their browser, when it doesn’t make sense – does the value lie in Windows Live application services, or does it lie in Internet Explorer? There’s no rationale in their policy right now, and it looks as if it’s degenerating into an ego issue – stop the spread of Firefox at any cost. If Ray Ozzie is to be believed through his “The Internet Services disruption ” memo, MS is now a services company, only with multiple product offerings. (As an aside, this model is precisely what Gates had alluded to in his book “Business @ The Speed Of Thought” more than half a decade ago. Talk about visionary!) So why is it competing in a senseless, hopelessly commoditized market which isn’t even a revenue source, where all it gets is bad publicity, and where its product offering is way behind competitors from a feature and ease-of-use point of view?

If Microsoft has the courage to back up its vision with action, it ought to include a copy of Firefox with Windows Vista, as the default browser. But the home page ought to be Windows Live. Hmm – now that’s a move that makes sense!

What’s the best mobile browser out there? On my Nokia 6670, I’ve tried NetFront 3.2, Opera for mobile (the 15-day trial). Both of these run neck-to-neck in terms to overall experience. There are a few features NetFront has that Opera doesn’t, and vice versa. But I wasn’t happy with either of them – the speed, the rendering, the fonts (awful for both) – mobile browsing wasn’t quite there yet, I thought.

Enter Opera Mini. In a single stroke, Opera has managed to eliminate most, if not all, of the problems that plagued the other browser offerings out there. Opera Mini is a Java application, so advantage number one is that it’ll run on any phone that can run Java apps – so it doesn’t have to be a Nokia smartphone running Symbian Series60, or the high-end Sony Ericsson or Motorola ones. Repeat – it is not a native Symbian or Windows Mobile or Palm application; it’s a Java app.

There are two version of this phone – for low and high memory phones. So for those of you with, for instance, a Nokia 6610 (amazing phone, wish I owned one), you can try the low-memory version. The high-memory version will run on the Nokia 6600, 6630, 6670, 6680, 7710, nGage, and I guess the N-series. See the beauty? Even the Nokia 6610 can have a full-featured browser now! All you need is Java and a GPRS/3G connection.

That’s the Basic (MIDP 1)-type browser.

And that’s the Advanced (MIDP 2) browser.
The installation is dead-simple: it’s a direct download from www.opera.com/mini, no licence agreements, no filling out forms or anything. Click, download, install – right from your existing browser. Or of course, you could download it on your PC/laptop and copy it to your phone via Infrared/Bluetooth/plain old USB. At 100KB, it’s one of the smallest applications I’ve come across. And for a browser, that is stupendous.

And the browsing experience is something else! Opera Mini renders its own fonts, and it does a very good job of that. The default font is very very readable, and there’s also a small font option that packs much more onto one screen, while still keeping things very clear. The sheer quality of the fonts hits you. Those with small screens (low memory phones) will love the small font option. The home page has an address bar, a Google search box, a list of configurable bookmarks, and a short history. Cool!

Before I get any further, here’s a quickie on how Opera Mini works – your requests go via an Opera server, which does the page retrieval on your behalf, parses the page, makes it phone-friendly and passes it back to the phone, taking a huge rendering load off the tiny mobile browser. It also handles the available network bandwidth quite well ( Russell Beattie thinks that it does a very good job of overcoming “network latency”), so your GPRS connection does feel very fast and responsive.

Flip side/annoyances? Sure. Since it isn’t a native application, there’s a confirmation box that pops up on my Nokia phone, asking if I want to allow the application to connect to the Internet, every time I click on a link. I’m used to it now, but it’s annoying nevertheless. Then again, being a Java application means that if you leave it in memory for a couple of days, it’ll eat up almost all your phone RAM – so that means exiting and restarting the browser. Also, no downloads. Shocking, but true! You can’t use Opera Mini to download anything to your hard disk, so you’ll have to use NetFront for that.

I’ve become a huge fan! I use this browser on the train shuttling between Mumbai and Pune, on the bus to-and-fro work – I’ve even begun checking and replying to my email first thing in the morning, before I’ve even read the morning paper. Oh, and if my newspaper walla plays truant, I end up reading the paper on Opera Mini too! Go get it!

(Doesn’t it sound like one of those TeleBrand ads you see too often lately?!)

The Nokia 6670 I bought recently has turned out to be a computer in itself. I’ve found myself using my ThinkPad less and less as the week’s gone by.

Email:
I’ve configured both my Gmail and RahulGaitonde.org POP3 accounts on the phone. The built-in email client does a very good job at retrieving, composing and displaying messages and their attachments. It’s also well integrated with the rest of the system, so I can click on most files and select “Send as email”. I’ve heard that Profimail’s the best email client out there, but i.) it isn’t nearly as integrated as the default mail client, and ii.) it isn’t free! After spending nearly Rs. 13000 for this beast, I’m not spending a paisa more

Internet Browsing:
Netfront is a decent browser. It loads reasonably fast, has Javascript support, renders pages quite well, supports SSL. All-in-all, I’m happy. The only thing is, it’s a pretty big application – if you’re running Netfront, you might not be able to open other heavy apps like RealPlayer. According to TaskSpy, while it itself is using 104KB of memory, Netfront (without loading any web page) is taking up 5104KB! I use Netfront and Opera alternately. Both are neck-and-neck in terms of features and usability, but then again, Opera’s only a 14-day evaulation. I don’t see why. Opera is now a free download for Windows and Linux, without the ads, so why not for Series 60? How long before browsers on mobiles outnumber those on desktops? Think issue: Business models for broswer-based ISVs.

In any case, having an Internet browser on your mobile phone is a great timesaver. It takes my bus about 30 minutes to reach my workplace. I use that time to catch up on my personal email, daily news and blogs. By the time I’m at work, I can be productive right away.

The Nokia PC Suite is a wonderful way of connecting to your phone. You can use either the provided data cable, or Infrared (which newer phones such as this one don’t support aynmore), or Bluetooth.

I use the Nokia Phone Browser all the time to manage documents and contacts on my phone, through an Explorer-like interface:

Another fantastic component is the Nokia PC Sync. I can sync my Lotus Notes calendar, address book and TODO list with my phone.

No more typing in stuff into my phone. Simply use Lotus Notes and hit “Synchronise”.

Speaking of not typing in stuff, you can send SMSes via Nokia’s Text Editor. It even integrates with your Address Book.