NetFront 3.5 First Impressions
Posted by Steve Laser on 02/8/08 in Browsers, NetFront
JK on the Run today reported that the new concept version of NetFront 3.5 is out now instead of on Monday. I downloaded it and will give you my first impressions.
Read on for more photos and comparisons to Opera and IE.
Above is a screenshot of Yahoo Top News. I found that to scroll around the page using your finger is not recommended. I believe the surface area of a finger is too large for it to accurately read the input. The stylus, however, works perfectly. You can move anywhere on the page quickly.
If you double click on a section, it highlights it as in the photo below:
Above you can see a thin red square in the upper left corner of the highlighted part of the page. You can move that square with your stylus anywhere on the page. When you click once inside the square it then opens up to that part of the page.
In the next photo, I moved the square to the bottom right of the page.
Now I click inside the square:
It’s so easy to use. I found it to be very intuitive and fun! I really have grown to dislike using the scroll bars on the bottom and right side to navigate. The browser is wonderful to use. It would be even better if you could use your finger instead of the stylus, but it is still far better than what we had before.
Bookmarks are handled in a different way than you would expect. You touch the “Operation” button on the bottom left, choose Bookmarks, then the Bookmarks page opens:
In this case the Yahoo News Headlines page is selected. If you choose a page above or below it, then that page becomes selected:
Here I chose the BBC page and clicked on it to open it.
How does this same page look in Opera?
Opera opens it as a mobile browser, hence the list. I clicked on Top Stories, then choose the Putin story to see how Opera would render the same page as above:
Quite a difference. Here’s the same with Pocket Internet Explorer:
It, too, handles it as a mobile page. Here’s the Putin story in IE:
Same as Opera and a striking difference from NetFront.
I found pages loaded quickly for a pocket pc. In fact, I feel it loaded pages quicker than Opera, which is included in my HTC Advantage. The pages look beautiful as well.
This program is a joy to use. I didn’t run into any problems with it. It worked smoothly and was easy to navigate. I believe this will become my main browser.
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Nice post, Steve.
It looks like you’re using the default view mode in Opera. If you select”desktop computer” under the “identify as” setting, you won’t ever have to look at mobile versions of sites again! Desktop mode isn’t well suited for browsing on QVGA screens, but it’s not too bad on the Advantage’s VGA display. Opera Mobile 9.5 and Skyfire should give that assessment a huge boost, so they can’t be released soon enough for me.
Thanks for sharing your initial thoughts on NetFront. What device did you test it on? I thought it was the Advantage, but the screenshots are all 360 x 480. I think I’ll stick with Opera 8.65 on my Advantage until 9.5, Skyfire, and maybe Firefox Mobile are released. :-)
http://mobilitysite.com/2008/01/the-ultimate-umpc-is-not-a-umpc/
Trying it out now. I can’t wait for Opera 9.5 to show up myself, even if I know it’ll cost me an arm and a leg again to upgrade. Opera tends to crash, and I’ve been using the NetFront 3.4 TP… which is far, far faster than 3.3 was. And they’ve already jumped to 3.5.
I wonder if they’ll deploy this on the PSP and other Sony or Sony Ericsson devices soon?
Thanks, Steve! I appreciate all the links :-)
I enjoyed that Advantage piece and liked how you concluded that while it’s not really a UMPC (in Microsoft and/or x86 terms), it’s YOUR UMPC. Because that’s what it all boils down to in the end, really: what’s right for YOU. Mobile technology is general is all about personal choice for me, so the so-called “perfect” device just varies from person to person.
Thanks again for the overview. I think I’ll give NetFront a spin on the Tilt.
I’m running this on an Axim x51v, Jenn - it works bloody fast with WM5, and is a far sight faster than Netfront 3.3 ever was, and is better than 3.4 is at scrolling across pages. My only complaint so far is that it doesn’t have Flash support, so I can’t test it with other sites like YouTube… but I will say that it moves well.
One other annoyance is that you don’t have Soft Key access, or Bookmark access, in Full Screen Mode. You have to switch to ‘Normal View’ to get that going, so if it’s not in your history… you’ll have to either enter the page manually, or else type in the first few letters of the URL and hope that NF 3.5 pulls up the right link.
Hi Haesslich,
As I know Flash is already supported on Netfront 3.4. I believe the final version of 3.5 will contain Flash as well.
I downlaoded the CAB file, but it tells me that it’s “not a valad Windows CE Setup file”
Does it work for Dell Axim X50v?