Back in December, I wrote in this blog about the Skyfire mobile browser, which is virtually unique in being able to show web pages not only as they should appear in a desktop browser, but also supporting Java, Flash and moving video content.

Since that posting, things have gone a little quiet, so I contacted Skyfire to see if there was any news. It appears the company is working on an updated beta release, but the spokesperson would only say that this is expected "in the spring", which implies it is a month or two away at least. No word yet on when a full release version might be available.

I also shared with Skyfire some of the problems I've noticed after using the browser for a while. My main concern is that it is often slow - taking several minutes to load a page, for example. The spokesperson said that some issues are due to the mobile network and tariff a specific mobile user has signed up with, but it should be noted that another mobile browser I have installed - Opera Mini - does not seem to suffer as much from this snail-like download problem.

Other gripes include Skyfire's behaviour if it cannot load a page, which might happen for various reasons, such as momentary loss of signal. When this happens, the browser just does nothing. No error message, nothing. Skyfire just reverts to the page you were looking at before, as if you hadn't clicked a link at all.

However, it should be pointed out that this is a beta version (v 0.85.0.7927), and that bugs are still being ironed out at this stage. And when Skyfire does work as expected, it really is impressive.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on February 6, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

There have been a number of browsers available for mobile handsets, but based on my early experience, Skyfire looks like one of the better ones. It is the first browser I have used that allows you to view video content on web sites, as well as Flash animations and Java-based content.

Like Safari on the Apple iPhone or Opera's mobile browsers, Skyfire shows you the whole web page. This will almost certainly prove too small to read on most phones, so you can select a position on the screen to zoom in on, magnifying the text to make it easier on the eye.

Using my own handset, a HTC S730 running Windows Mobile 6, I found I could browse sites such as VNUnet.com (see screenshot) and see the animated Flash adverts on the screen, just as you would on a PC browser. I was also to click through to the audio/video section and click to watch the weekly news debrief video.

I also tried out Skyfire on the BBC's news site, and could watch the video content there just as easily. The video quality seems as good as you would get while watching on a PC screen, and is quite impressive considering it is being delivered over a cellular (3G) connection.

However, while Skyfire claims that its browser is twice as fast as other mobile browsers, I found it took about a minute to open on many occasions, and some web pages were also inexplicably slow to load, while others appeared as quickly as you would expect on a PC.

It should be noted that these problems could be due to issues with the cellular network rather than Skyfire itself, and the software is still officially in beta even if it is now free for anyone to download and install.

I also tried out Skyfire using the Wi-Fi interface of the S730 handset, and found that pages loaded faster, but this did not seem to any impact on the quality of the video.

Users should be prepared for browsing eating into the battery life of their handset. After a few hours of tests, my phone had used up about half of a full battery charge, whereas it usually lasts for days or even weeks if used just for talking and texting.

With Java and Flash support, Skyfire enables access to many more sites than is possible with some other phone browsers I have used. I was able to create and edit a document using Google Docs, for example, which isn't something I would recommend doing on a tiny smartphone screen, but does prove that it is possible.

I also used Skyfire to log into VNUnet.com's web-based content management system, which is heavily Java-based, and found I could carry out tasks, although the tiny screen again made this difficult. Nevertheless, it shows that Skyfire could be used for emergency access to Java-based enterprise applications, should the need arise to get information while out of the office, for example.

Overall, Skyfire looks like a good browser to try out if you have a handset running Windows Mobile 5 or 6, or a Symbian phone with Nokia's S60 user interface. A brief list of supported phones is available here.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on December 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been having a try out with the BlackBerry Storm, Research in Motion's (RIM's) first touch-screen device. My colleague Daniel Robinson has carried out a full review or you can get a look at the Storm in action by watching our video review.

I was keen to get my hands on the device for two reasons. Firstly, I've long coveted an Apple iPhone, mainly for its lovely looks, and screen size and quality and so was interested to have a try out on RIM's touch-screen version; and also because I've just switched over from using my old 8700 BlackBerry and a separate Nokia mobile handset to having just one device, the BlackBerry Bold and so wanted to see how the Storm would compare.

Previously in my old unconverged world of separate mobile/emailer I never used the BlackBerry for anything but checking my email and replying to the odd one here and there; I made the occasional phone call and sent the odd text but much preferred my mobile for those things. So moving to the Bold was quite an experience and I'd advise anyone considering a switch away from two devices to a combined phone/emailer to thoroughly try out the keyboards of any potential handsets before making a purchase.

I found the BlackBerry SMS and phone capabilities difficult to get used to, mainly due to what seem like minor changes from a normal mobile handset but they caused a lot of frustration for me.

For example, the Bold and Storm save all messages in one folder, while I'm used to separate folders for received/sent/draft texts; while trying to change the phone settings, including selecting a ring tone and choosing between the vibrate/ring/vibrate+ring options, proved a real chore, requiring navigating through several different pages and dozens of options before finding the correct Profiles/Advanced/Normal/Phone sequence and arriving at the right place. I also found the requirement of repeating the same choice of Volume/Number of Vibrations and so on for the phone when it is out of holster or in holster an unnecessary duplication of effort; the same process was then required for setting up my preferred SMS profile.

Having said all that, I still rate the BlackBerry as an emailer device, and RIM has made huge improvements since I first began using one a few years ago, especially in terms of the speed of mobile browsing and the ability to view spreadsheets and other business documents.
From my fairly brief look at the Storm, I couldn't spot many different features from the Bold apart from the obvious touch-screen upgrade. Both devices have the same icons, browser, and phone capabilities.

One key upgrade with the Storm was the inclusion of a Chat icon in the menu, offering direct links to download pages for popular instant messaging tools. However, I didn't have much joy with this feature. I managed to download Google Chat, but was unable to log in to my account to try it out.

The music and video players are the same on both devices; the video quality was particularly impressive on both, with high quality picture and sound.

One strange difference was in the charger. I didn't take the charger for the borrowed Storm home with me overnight and when the battery died that evening I automatically went to plug in my Bold charger, only to find they have different connectors. It would be great to see RIM, and in fact all mobile handset makers, standardise on chargers across their different models and it would certainly earn them some green brownie points.

So now onto the Storm's headline-grabber - the touch-screen capability. The general consensus around the vnunet.com office was underwhelming - most people found the virtual keys very difficult to get used to, even with the addition of a "click" when pressing down on the screen - and this was my initial reaction too.

However, having used the Storm as my main emailer/phone for a few days I got used to the way the keyboard worked - I found it helped to aim to put my finger slightly to the left of keys rather than direct centre of them. I also really liked the ability to go back to using a SureType keypad and predictive text, especially for sending SMS messages, something I really miss with the Bold.

A final point: the way the screen switches view to reflect whether you're holding the phone sideways or upright is a neat feature, but it is slow in switching between the views. In the end I found myself favouring a sideways full keyboard view for emailing; and upright SureType for texting.

Overall my first touch-screen BlackBerry experience was good enough to make me consider a full-time move to a similar device in the future - but preferably one with a more satisfying mobile phone experience.

Posted by Madeline Bennett on December 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (17)

Sony has very kindly loaned me one of its PRS-505 electronic book devices to try out.

In particular, I wanted to see how it would measure up as a medium for carrying around Microsoft Word and Acrobat PDF files for reading on the move, as the alternative is to print them out or load them into a PDA or laptop.

The first thing worthy of note is that the 6in display of the eBook Reader has to be seen to be believed. Although only black-and-white and lacking a backlight, it has such a high display resolution that it resembles more a printed page than any other computer screen I've ever seen.

So how does it double as a mobile document reader? Sadly, not too well. It's easy enough to get files onto the eBook Reader, but while PDF files are supported natively, Word documents are not and must be converted to RTF format first.

And while the text in PDF files displays very well, any embedded images or graphics can only be seen in the entire page view; zoom in, and the graphic simply isn't displayed any more.

But the eBook Reader is really designed for looking at books, specifically those published in the EPUB digital format, and Sony supplies the PRS-505 with excerpts from several titles in this format for buyers' to try out.

The eBook Reader is a nice size and weight for the job. It is just a bit smaller than a sheet of A5 paper, weighs about 260g, and comes fitted into a leather-effect cover that makes it look like a notepad when closed. The device itself appears to be made of brushed steel, and feels like it is built to last.

Overall, the eBook Reader is fairly easy to use, but it seems to have too many controls. There are ten buttons labelled 0-9 down one side of the screen, plus two navigation controls, dedicated next-page and previous page keys, as well as tiny buttons to zoom in and take you to the main menu.

The eBook Reader has two slots for Sony Memory Stick Duo and SD Card Flash media, from which it can read files. Users can also load files onto the device over a USB cable from a PC using a supplied Windows tool called eBook Library, which seems to have been designed to imitate the look and feel of Apple's iTunes.

One advantage the PRS-505 has over other electronic devices is that its E-Ink "Electronic Paper" screen uses much less power than standard LCD technology, and consequently the batteries last much longer than those of other electronic devices. I used the PRS-505 for several days before the battery charge indicator went down even a single step.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on December 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

This photo shows Apple's iPhone 3G alongside two other new devices, the HP iPaq 914 and Nokia's E71. As the picture demonstrates, they are all approximately the same size, although varying in weight and thickness.

All three devices represent the latest technology, supporting 3G wireless broadband, Wi-Fi, and GPS capability for navigation and other location-based services. As such, these are all high-end devices and potential rivals for RIM's BlackBerry models in the enterprise.

Of the three, the Nokia E71 is the slimmest and the lightest, while the iPaq 914 is the heaviest and thickest at 154g and 16mm. However, it also appears to have the largest battery capacity, at 1940mAh.

The Nokia E71 has already been reviewed in depth by IT Week here. To sum up: it is a very capable business messaging handset, but its keyboard is somewhat cramped compared to a BlackBerry.

The same criticism can be levelled at the iPaq 914, but I found I could enter text fairly easily. The HP device also has one feature that might please BlackBerry users; a jog dial thumbwheel on the right side of the case, similar to that seen on older BlackBerry models before RIM introduced its 'Pearl' mini trackball. It also supports touch-screen input via a stylus as well as a standard five-way navigation control, giving users more input choice than most devices.

Apple's iPhone 3G has the best display and offers the best web experience through its Safari browser, but has two drawbacks as far as I'm concerned; no keyboard and a battery that cannot be removed by the user.

As with the first iPhone, the device is very simple to use, but I found Apple's on-screen 'soft' keyboard a pain - even compared with the tiny keys on the E71 and iPaq 914 - and kept finding myself hitting the wrong letter. The iPhone could prove a hit with business users that need a decent browser - such as for web-based applications - but I can't see heavy email users or anyone whose job entails entering a lot of data being happy with it.

All three models feature some form of assisted GPS (A-GPS) to speed up the time it takes to get a fix on the user's location. While the E71 has Nokia Maps, both the iPaq 914 and the iPhone use Google Maps. The iPhone version of this application is slicker, but both have pretty much the same functionality, including the option to fix your location GPS and get directions to a specified destination. However, Nokia Maps supports turn-by-turn directions for drivers, although it costs extra to have the directions spoken aloud.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on July 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

This photo shows the HP iPaq 614 Business Navigator alongside a standard-sized PDA and a smartphone, showing how it fits somewhere between the two in size.

In fact, the iPaq 614 is almost exactly the same size as a Palm Treo, although it has a numeric keypad instead of the Palm’s qwerty keyboard. Like the Treo, it has a touch-screen as well.

The Business Navigator part of the device’s name refers to the act that this iPaq has built-in GPS capability and uses Google Maps to show your location and give directions to a destination when travelling.

This means that the device pulls down the map data as needed, instead of storing it on a memory card, and so you need a live data connection to use the navigation feature.

Fortunately, the iPaq 614 supports 3G with HSDPA where this is available, and also has Wi-Fi capability for speedier web browsing when near an access point. It also supports Bluetooth for hands-free calls. A full review of the HP iPaq 614 Business Navigator will appear in a future issue of IT Week.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on April 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Even though it was released  last summer, I've only recently got around to properly trying out the Opera Mini browser from Opera Software, but I found that it actually gives a really decent web experience on a mobile device.

Opera Mini works somewhat like the Safari browser in Apple's iPhone, in that it shrinks a web page so that the whole of it is displayed on the handset's screen. Of course, this makes it too small to actually read anything, but you can easily zoom in to any part of the page you are interested in.

It doesn't feature the gesture-based controls of Apple's browser, but a simple tap on the screen with a stylus is arguably quicker, and the browser's back button zooms out again just as quickly.

Unlike Safari, Opera Mini is a thin client browser. This means that web requests are handled by a proxy server operated by Opera, which renders each page and compresses it before sending the resulting page image down to the phone. This means that less data gets sent to your handset, and so browsing eats up less of your monthly data plan.

I tested Opera Mini on a Windows Mobile 6 device, and found it handled many common web pages such as BBC News Online very well. However, it does trip up on web-based applications that test for supported browsers before proceeding.

Browsing was reasonably fast, even over a GPRS connection, and even faster when we switched to a Wi-Fi access point. Best of all, Opera Mini is a free download, and works on a broad range of handsets that support Java.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on February 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

OQO's new version of its Model e2 UMPC is already shipping, and here's a (slightly blurry) picture to prove it. OQO kindly left this model with me to try out when they dropped in to our offices where IT Week Labs is located.

As you can see, the unit is almost indistinguishable from the original Model e2, which we reviewed back in October. It is very slightly heavier (but not so you would notice) and has a new antenna to support HSDPA – the high-speed 'wireless broadband' version of the 3G mobile networks.

The antenna can be extended out from the top right corner of the case, in a manner that makes it look like some kind of spy gizmo that James Bond might have used in the sixties. This is theoretically to boost the signal if reception is poor, but it seemed to have little extra effect when I tried it, and the antenna looks like it might easily snap if the user isn't careful.

From our central London office I managed to get a 3.6Mbit/s connection on T-Mobile, as reported by the Novatel MobiLink Network Connection Manager tool installed on the OQO. Using some of the free broadband speed test tools available on the web, the HSDPA connection was rated at various speeds up to 688kbit/s, which is roughly comparable with what you would see with a 1Mbit/s home broadband connection.

Using the device backed up this finding – it seemed reasonably fast when browsing web sites, but not as fast as you would expect from using a Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection. I even accessed one or two web-based applications and found performance acceptable, if not great.

Of course, get away from metropolitan areas and performance will almost certainly be worse than this, and will drop back to standard 3G or even GPRS the further away you get from a big city. I haven't tested this with the OQO so far, but have frequently found 3G coverage to be patchy outside of London.

This extra wireless capability does not really make the OQO a rival for a smartphone. The device I tested did not have the ability to make voice calls, although there is nothing preventing you from installing Skype or some other voice-over-IP client and using this instead.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on December 10, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

This photo shows how small and neat RIM's latest BlackBerry device is. The Pearl 8120 adds 802.11b/g Wi-Fi capability to the basic Pearl handset design that was introduced last year, without increasing the size at all and adding just a couple of grams to the weight.

For workers that already use a BlackBerry, the SureType keyboard will probably count against switching. This puts two letters on each key and uses predictive algorithms to work out what you are trying to type. It works quite well, but slows you down sometimes and is probably not the best solution for those who need to send lots of emails.

However, if your company has a BlackBerry server and you don't necessarily need to respond instantly to every email sent to you, then the Pearl is definitely worth a look. Its size and weight are in line with many basic Nokia handsets, making it easier to carry than some earlier BlackBerry models.

The addition of Wi-Fi means that the Pearl can browse web sites much faster when in range of an access point, but has little real impact on the email service.

A full review of the BlackBerry Pearl 8120 will appear in a future issue of IT Week, and the device is available now in the UK from O2.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on November 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

OQO launched its first model of ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) aimed at the European market earlier this week, and I went along to get a closer look at the device.

The OQO model e2 is a full-spec PC that just happens to fit in the palm of your hand. What images don’t convey is how good the screen is – even though it is only 5 inches across the diagonal, I could quite clearly read the text on the 800 x 480 Windows desktop.

The unit itself is quite comfortable to hold, at least for the short period I tried it out, and it feels quite natural to type with thumbs BlackBerry-style while cradling it in your hands.

One concern of this model is likely to be battery life. The company quotes the OQO as offering up to three hours only on the standard batteries. Nevertheless, this looks like the only UMPC I have seen that could stand up as a serious rival for a full-blown laptop.

Look out for a full review of the OQO model e2 in future, when IT Week will evaluate the performance and battery life of the model, as well as reporting on using such a small form factor device for productivity work.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on September 21, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)