Tuesday April 8
 
11:32
 
Netfront For Windows Mobile 6

I’ve just downloaded and installed the Windows Mobile “Concept Version” 3.5 of Netfront.

Netfront is a web browser used in many Japanese mobile phones - there’s a version of it in my Sharp phone, and in my Samsung phone. I don’t know how prevalent it is elsewhere in the world.

Initial impressions:

• Netfront renders webpages on a “virtual desktop”, eg. 800×1024. Scrolling around the page is smooth and fast - a big improvement on the jumpy and “screen at a time” implementation of Pocket IE.
• In addition to arrow-key scrolling and finger scrolling, double tapping on the page shows a small thumbnail representation, you can use the stylus to move around.
• Default sizes (Text Size of Medium, Zoom of 100%) renders images and text too large, needing too much scrolling around the page. Setting Text Size to Largest and Zoom to 50%, graphics are nicely downsized, and text remains just large enough to read. Text smoothing is used, so even small text is readable - unlike Pocket IE.
• Lick The Lard doesn’t render properly - the entire right hand side is missing. Pocket IE doesn’t have these problems. This blog (Lemon Soju) seems to render correctly.
• When it doesn’t find fonts, eg the Verdana font used here, it renders in Courier. Not pretty. Update: I fixed this by going to Tools -> Browser Settings, then playing about with the settings and then restarting the browser. I can’t say specifically what I did because Courier isn’t even listed in the font list - potentially an uninitialised variable caused Courier to become the default?
• There’s a built in “Infoseek Japanese to English” page translation option - not yet tested.
• Websites recognise the browser as an English language desktop browser, which means I no longer get Japanese “optimised for mobile” webpages. I like that a lot - Google, for example, always presents Japanese pages with no option to change to English. I should try downloading Google Maps again and see if I get one with English.
• It’s nice to have English menus again :)

The trial expires at the end of May. Looking at the Symbian page, Netfront seems to require payment for keeping its browsers long term - not good. Still, they seem to be releasing new “concept” versions every few months at the moment, so maybe it will continue to be useable until Mobile Firefox becomes available.

Update: When Netfront is running, it seems that some applications, such as Mobile Outlook, are no longer are able to access the internet. Other applications, such as the Gmail Java application, work fine. Opera Mini seems unable to access the internet at all after Netfront is installed. I need to test this more to verify.

Update 2: After rebooting the S11HT, I could access internet with Opera Mini again. I then closed Opera Mini, run Netfront, and tried starting Opera Mini again - no connection. It definitely seems that Netfront is making a change somewhere that prevents other applications from using the internet connection, even when it is not running. As a side note, I uninstalled and reinstalled Netfront - after reinstallation, the previous settings from the first installation were restored, so Netfront isn’t particularly good at cleaning up after itself.