Submitted by “Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the “internet.” But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.”
I think it is as good as the iPhone, at least the web browsing part.
As fast, real VGA, but not quite as smooth.
And it does not crash
Why do I hear so many people bitching about how the iPhone’s web browser “sucks” and is “slow” etc. if it’s the best on the market according to this? Sure, it’s not perfect and I would be happier if Apple allowed competition on the app store but still, stop bitching, people who bitch on other articles.
I have no complaints about speed, but it does suck because it keeps crashing. I have to restart the iPhone two or three times a day to make Safari usable.
An Apple rep (as well as many fanboys) recommended turning off Javascript!! It’s already missing flash and Java, why don’t they just port Links to iPhone and have it all plain text then?!
Edited 2008-11-28 00:01 UTC
I think App Store rejected their application. 😉
“I have no complaints about speed, but it does suck because it keeps crashing. I have to restart the iPhone two or three times a day to make Safari usable. ”
I don’t have such experience with my iPhone, it crashed i think two or three times since i bought it (3 months ago) and that’s it, no way that it has the behavior that you are describing, I suspect that you are over exaggerating…..
Or maybe he goes to Javascript-heavier sites than you do?
It may be unstable on heavy websites, not just javascript-heavy but the recent 2.2 update greatly improves its stability. No longer chokes on the sites that used to upset it sometimes on 2.1.
Same here, I’ve only experience a few crashes in the past few months (once or twice a month is OK with me). If it did crash daily though I would be very pissed. But contrary to those cool, popular Apple-bashers, for the majority of people, it rarely crashes. I used to use IE7 on Vista and it crashed nearly daily. That is on the world’s most popular browser..
It works fine for me. Safari crashes very rarely. I’m typeing this reply on my iPhone now. The whole reason I bought the iPhone was because the browser is so much better than any other phone browser I have ever used.
Because people want it to work like on their desktop system. And they run it off their standards of that not comparing what the others have to offer. Also if they did purchase an other phone they will cling onto what features are better then the iPhone so they don’t feel like they mad a bad purchasing decision.
What about a Sony Ericsson P990 or P1?
Yep, or Nokia E90 Communicator, or some other phones that do web especially well? Where are they from the review? You know, the choice of phone models in this comparative review may even seem intentional in order to make iPhone look superior as a web phone??
blackberry pearl on Verizon EVDO
gizmodo.com 6s to load
WSJ 4s to load
Youtube 12s to load
Slate 35s
National geographic 27s
So yes 3G is slow
I’ve had many, many issues with (mostly news) websites forcing their stripped down WAP gateway on me when browsing with my BlackBerry. The BB’s browser allows you to change your UA settings to IE, pocket IE, Netscape, and Openwave, but no matter which one I choose the damn websites always give me a default mobile home page. This wouldn’t be so bad if they still allowed the actual content I was going for to be found, but they don’t.
For example: Here on OSNews I’ll click on a link to the source article in order to read it in full. Instead of getting the article content, however, I only get an RSS-like page with several headlines. More often than not the story I’m looking for is nowhere to be found in that stripped down interface.
This wouldn’t be an issue at all if the news sites would preserve the link you originally clicked and give you some sort of mobile version of that article; instead they detect your browser (or possibly your service provider’s mobile gateway) and redirect you to the front page.
Interestingly, this didn’t happen nearly as much on the iPhone, but it did happen. This more than anything leads me to believe they reroute based on your IP address more than your browser’s UA string.
The mobile version of osnews DOES have the FULL articles, it is fully usable. The only problem is if you are coming from the full page and you are following a link, because since v4 of osnews, the URLs changed, and the mobile version doesn’t support them. You need to email Adam, our webmaster, about it and explain the problem. I did so a year ago, but nothing happened.
Sorry Eugenia, I should have been more clear. The original content on OSNews shows up fine, it’s external links to the source articles that are often buggered by their respective web servers. This happens from other sites as well, particularly lowendmac.com as nearly every Mac news site is faulty in this respect.
The only issue I’ve ever had here is commenting from a BlackBerry; it simply doesn’t work. It worked fine on the iPhone if I forced it to load the full standard version of the site.
Edited 2008-11-28 23:17 UTC
The last time i tried, i was able to comment from the mobile version of the site fine…
My treo 800w with WM6.1Pro, Opera Mobile 8.65 and Celio Redfly is rather nice
I’d run Opera Mobile 9.5, but it currently doesn’t work right with the Redfly and its 800×480 resolution screen.
I’ve used the “Internet” on my phones for years. The WWW part of it can be a pain sometimes, but most sites I go to are textual only, like they should be. The other bits of the “Internet”, such as email, SSH, FTP, etc etc have worked fine on decent phones for years.
Posted this with my redfly + Treo 800w. I love this thing…
Thank you. WWW=internet in the article was bugging me. Might be acceptable from mainstream media, but from a geek site?
Yeah, it drives me insane when people take something they don’t know much about and blurr and fudge descriptions instead of finding out whats correct.
Ive used many different mobile phones and devices when connecting to the internet, from nokia e61’s, Sony P series and Microsoft WM and for me the iPhone and Safari and in a completely different league. Browsing the web on such a small device is not a problem, a lot of the safari crashes are fixed in 2.2, it’s a real joy to use and is incredibly handy. Here in the uk one of our stores (Argos) allows you to reserve items in store (so you don’t have to worry about selling out) and ive had no problem with the iphone doing this, hopefully other stores will catch on.
OSnews, various forums including neowin are easy to surf as is Microsoft OWA.
My Nokia N95-1’s native browser (webkit-based) works pretty well, I added Opera Mini that is even faster and brighter
Kochise
more like the internet is broke. you end up receiving megabytes of useless junk for a few kilobytes of useful data. The rest is just fluff, eyecandy and adds. seriously think about how much crap gets loaded up just to read a paragraph of information on most web pages. its a waist of cpu cycles and bandwidth.
I tend to agree although mobile versions of those web sites might have less ads and other nonnecessary junk. Besides, in this world where many things are financed by adverstising, things are not likely getting better in that regards.
By the way, if using mobile versions of web sites does not help, and too many ads and other such content fill the tiny screen of your mobile browser, maybe something like Adblock Plus extension for Firefox might help? I have little experience of mobile web usage so far, so I wonder if there are such addons for mobile web browsers already? There should be in my opinion. It seems such browser extensions could be much more useful with a mobile web browser (slow CPU, tiny screen etc.), and could help security too if one is able to block nonnecessary content.
Edited 2008-11-30 20:52 UTC
As to mobile phones that are primarily designed to be useful for browsing the web too, they really should have included Nokia E90 Communicator in this comparative test too. Dropping E90 from the test and reviewing a poorer Nokia model (from the web point of view) instead seems a bit odd choice. Nokia Communicators are the pioneers in the whole mobile web field.
Besides that, even some of the other phone models reviewed in this test are designed to be primarily mobile phones only, and including a primitive web browser is only something little extra for them.
Other than that, a rather useful and informative comparative review anyway. But I’m still not going to buy an iPhone despite all the praise it gets in this review…
Really, any phone that supports Java can use Opera Mini and display the full web….