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Symbian platform: UIQ
Review first published in:
Palmtop User magazine, issue
8
 It seems somewhat odd to have a browser war
flaring up for UIQ. The P800 and P900 come with 'Internet', a fairly capable
browser, and Opera for UIQ is a free download, for those that need just a
little extra. And now there's NetFront, also released as a 'free demonstration
version', offering even more features than Opera. In essence, both Opera and
NetFront are fighting a war across many mobile computing platforms and want
their name to be associated with the best browsing experience, even on a
platform from which they won't make any money.
NetFront 3.1 is certainly comprehensive, with a mammoth,
tabbed 'Settings' panel that includes control of frames, Javascript, memory and
disk caches, language encoding and cookies, plus a lot more. There's also good
support for current web technologies and we were able to use interactive sites
such as eBay without difficulty. Just as with NetFront's initial offering for
the Nokia 9210 though, version 3.1 is memory hungry and you'll need at least
5MB of free execution memory for it to work smoothly. Assuming that its even
possible to load the current page-our test P800 ground to a halt when trying to
access the particularly image-heavy Expansys site. Still, such pages are
designed for desktop memory and processing power and perhaps its unreasonable
to expect everything to load perfectly on a handheld.
 NetFront's interface is also immature in
places, with pages part loading, blanking and then reloading, unresponsive
hyperlinks and a fluctuating progress indicator. Like Opera, there's a useful
Smart-Fit Rendering view, designed to eliminate horizontal scrolling. Windows
aren't handled quite as efficiently, though-the tab paradigm looks good, but
each window isn't kept fully rendered and has to be redrawn when brought to the
foreground. Finally, like Opera, NetFront can use your desktop's Internet
connection when your smartphone is cradled, which can be very useful for
seeding a bookmark list or for testing purposes. Free, from
www.access-sys-eu.com
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