REVIEW: IBE Group releases IBE Backup, the worst backup ever written for the PPC - General Topics

IBE Group has been pretty busy churning out applications and games the last year. I’ve closely followed these and published some articles / reviews on some of them (see for example the IBE Mail and Star Invader reviews). I’ve, in general, found their games and applications useless in almost every respect.
Their latest title, IBE Backup (current, tested version: 1.1, build 1.0.0.1658), is, as you may have already guessed, a backup application.
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Availability
The central homepage of IBE Group still doesn’t list the application; PocketGear does. There is a 3-day trial version of the application there; the commercial version costs a whopping $24.95, which is, in cases, considerably more expensive than all the other Pocket PC backup applications, except for Sprite Backup. Let’s see how it fares against them!
The user interface
The backup app tries to mimic the well-known Spb Backup very hard and, for a beginner, the reseblance may even cause him or her to actually believe he's using Spb Backup. Don’t know whether the IBE Group folks have bought the rights to do this (I seriously doubt it) or whether the Spb folks are actually happy to have such a bad title so similar to their quality backup product (I doubt this too).
Too bad the English of the application is much worse than that of – there are major typos and mistakes in the English in almost every dialog. And the underlying engine.. let’s spend some time on the engine itself.
The underlying backup engine
In a word: useless. It’s, first, very slow to back up – it needs almost an order of magnitude more time to back up a Pocket PC than the (in cases, MUCH cheaper) alternatives.
It can’t back up password-protected Pocket PC’s in scheduled mode either, which isn’t a problem with most of the alternatives any more.
It has no desktop-side for example file / registry extractor utilities either, unlike several of the alternatives.
The problems don’t end at this, however. The worst is still coming:
Showstopper, REALLY BAD problems
The restoration of the Registry seems to be completely broken. Seemingly, it does restore everything (which you can also check out by exporting the restored Registry and diff’ing it with the original one); for some strange reason, however, the Pocket PC just doesn’t see the restored contents. This applies to almost everything depending on the Registry and you can check it yourself by, say, checking out whether the contents of
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ Microsoft\Shell\TaskSwitch]
(that is, the Start menu history – the list of last-started five applications) is visible to the Pocket PC. Or, if the backlight settings, [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ ControlPanel\BackLight], are visible (they aren’t either).
What is more, third-party registry keys under [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\] (for example, those of Mobile Stream’s USB Modem) aren’t even restored. Give it a try if interested: get the trial version of USB Modem, install it and start it to see the trial countdown indeed starts. Backup your device with say, Spb Backup (and, of course, IBE Backup) and, upon restoration, make sure you let the device’s clock stay at the factory default. After the Spb Backup restoration (because the Registry will still have the related info), USB Modem will (correctly) refuse to work, unlike after the restoration with IBE Backup.
And, of course, this is just one application (of the many) where the problematic Registry restoration causes problems - you will have a LOT of problems with other apps / games if you do restore with this app.
Benchmarks
In the following benchmark chart, I’ve listed the benchmark results of backup and restore operations on three of my test Pocket PC’s. I’ve compared the backup/restore times and the file sizes to the latest (dated 01/30/2007) Sunnysoft 4-series Backup Manager build and the latest, version 1.5.5 of Spb Backup. As can clearly be seen, while IBE Backup produces about 3% smaller backup files than Spb, its back-up time is more than five times larger.
(n/t means „not tested“)
Verdict
As with all the other (tested) IBE Group products, avoid this title like plague. It’s not even worth checking it out: it’s that bad.
Unfotunately, IBE Group seems to become the second Emcon Emsys Technologies on the Pocket PC. (For anyone that doesn’t know what they are famous for: they have been probably the worst game developers for the Pocket PC. Make a generic search for ‘Emcon’ here to see it for yourself. Start with, say, this thread.) That is, downright useless applications and games priced high.
Recommended links
In addition to my previous IBE Group reviews, the Pocket PC Backup Bible is highly recommended.

Related

REVIEW: Bluetooth chatter / Bluejacking app Sniper

Ever wanted to use the Bluetooth capabilities of your Pocket PC for local (text) messaging and file transfer, including local broadcasting? Take a look at Sniper, which is a comparatively new, constantly updated native Bluetooth messenger utility.
Unfortunately, there are very few local Bluetooth-based applications on the Pocket PC platform. As has pointed out in my article on Microsoft (MS) Portrait, the only really usable, Bluetooth-capable, internet-less text messaging / file transfer application, Portrait isn’t able to work over the Microsoft Bluetooth stack, only over real TCP/IP networks (including BT PAN and Wi-Fi P2P), which the Microsoft Bluetooth stack doesn't support because it lacks support for the Bluetooth Personal Area Network (PAN).
The same stands for the very similar but already abandoned Gphone . Finally, the other two, similar applications, ProximityMail and Bluetooth Chat, are no longer supported and have never really worked. (Note that I elaborate on the latter two apps and, particularly, the current, similar project of the developer of the former in the Appendix at the end of this article.)
At last: native Microsoft Bluetooth stack messaging solution; on the other hand, some compatibility problems
The new application is definitely good in that it supports the Microsoft Bluetooth stack, as opposed to Microsoft Portrait. If you have a device with the Microsoft Bluetooth stack, you’ll certainly welcome the new application – at last, a local native Bluetooth messaging solution that doesn’t require Wi-Fi peer-to-peer networks or an active Internet connection.
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Unfortunately, it has some severe problems. First, while the homepage of the application advertises the app as PPC2k2+-compliant, it doesn’t seem to work with pre-WM5 Windows Mobile operating systems. I’ve tested all the available versions with both Pocket PC 2002, WM2003 and WM2003SE. I've made some example screenshots (see this and this) to show you it doesn't work: as can be seen, the installer can’t even install the WM5-only CAB files.
Furthermore, it’s incompatible with Widcomm/Broadcom Bluetooth stack-based devices like all HP iPAQ Pocket PC's (an example screenshot of it refusing running on the hx4700 is here), the Fujitsu-Siemens T800 series, the Acer n series and, of course, the Widcomm-hacked, WM5-based Dell Axim x50(v)/x51(v)'s. This is a very bad problem: developers of Bluetooth applications should at last notice that, as has already been pointed out in my articles (example here), Broadcom has in the meantime made its WinCE SDK freely available.
Available versions and differences between them; Bluejacking support in the trial version
There are two versions worth mentioning; first, of course, the latest one, 1.2.368, available here.
Bluejacking (see this article for a complete description), one of the most important and innovative (no other Pocket PC application is capable of this) feature of the application, is completely disabled in the latest, above-linked version. Older versions (for example, version 1.1.237 available here at ClickApps), however, still support this functionality in the demo, except mass-sending more than one file at a time. That is, if you want to give this functionality a try in the demo version (I certainly recommend it), get the older version.
Some examples of it in action
A Pocket PC device discovering two other Pocket PC’s.
Compared to MS Portrait or any other TCP/IP-based chatter application (including IRC clients), its chat feature is a bit more complicated to use. This is how it happens in practice: Sending a message: step 1, step 2. On the receiving end, you get it (note that if you see it this way, it means you’ve forgotten to disable the auto-receive of incoming beam) and save it. If you answer Yes, you’ll be taken to the messages; it's only then that you'll be able to read it. There, you can, for example, reply to the sender.
Examples of file transfer (sending files) 1, 2 3 (sending multiple files like this doesn’t work in the demo). At the receiving end, they’re saved in the pre-set save directory.
An example of bluejacking.
Verdict
If you want local chatting with other Microsoft BT stack-based Pocket PC's or non-Windows Mobile Bluetooth phones, give it a try. If you can’t use a Wi-Fi peer-to-peer connection (or full Internet connectivity) between your WM5 Microsoft BT stack-based devices, give it a try. If you want to do some bluejacking, give it a try. Otherwise, particularly if you have a pre-WM5 or Widcomm/Broadcom-based device, stick with the free MS Portrait.
Appendix: What about ProximityMail and Bluetooth Chat?
Unfortunately, the other two native (non TCP/IP-based, unlike MS Portrait and Gphone) Bluetooth messaging applications, ProximityMail and Bluetooth Chat (latest, tested, still available versions 1.44 and 0.5b, respectively) are both useless and no longer developed.
The former, ProximityMail, will never be updated; the developer, Inventop Corp, has removed all references to the product, including even the old download link (also see this). Its successor, BUZZeeBee (see the homepage for more info), still only has a desktop PC version. (They have been promising the Pocket PC version for months; there is still no sign of it).
The latter, Bluetooth Chat by Andrey Demidov, hasn’t been updated for three years and also seems to be completely abandoned. Needless to say, it has never really worked either.
personal i find it odd whne somebody who have that many posts
deside to make something i can only describe as a commercial
Rudegar said:
personal i find it odd whne somebody who have that many posts
deside to make something i can only describe as a commercial
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If there were a REAL alternative to this app, it wouldn't sound a commercial (check out my other, comparative reviews - I "trash" many apps I test). Unfortunately, when there is only one program for a given purpose, it's hard to write an article that doesn't sound like "musch as it has its share of problems, go get it".
As soon as there will be another, directly comparable alternate to this app, I promise to write a decent comparison
not working on omnia T_T
is there anything similar for android?

New, 2.6 version of Pocket Internet Explorer plug-in Webby Released!

It was some months ago that the previous, 2.5 version of the Pocket Internet Explorer plug-in (enhancer) Webby was released. Now, the new, 2.6 version has just been released.
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I really recommend the above-linked article to see what the advantages and the disadvantages of the previous version were. Here, I “only” elaborate on the new features and whether the problems or, at least, missing functionality I’ve emphasized in the previous version(s) have been fixed / implemented.
Webby is available here. It requires CF2 to run (make sure you download and install SP1, NOT the old, original version), which also means it’s “only” compatible with WM2003+ devices (bad news for pre-WM2003 (PPC2k, PPC2k2) users).
It has two versions: a free, severely “dumbed-down” (two tabs at most, two buttons definable – hardly any good, particularly when compared to the generous 2-4-week fully functioning trials of all comparable products, except for the slightly less dumbed-down NetFront) and a full (Pro) version. The latter costs $20, which is, in my opinion, quite much compared to the price (and capabilities / speed / compatibility) of Opera Mobile, NetFront or PIEPlus, the best, highly recommended alternatives (not to mention the free Mozilla / Firefox port Minimo, which gets better and better all the time and, now, is a pretty decent alternative at least on WM5 devices), particularly taking into account that the new add-on extension mechanism (still) doesn’t work in Webby.
Pros; new functionality
Add-in modules
Probably they are the most important features of the new version. These (are supposed to) implement additional functionalities like the URL builder known from MultiIE / PIEPlus.
Their list can be found here. Note that you should only visit this page from either Opera or Mozilla / Firefox on your desktop computer; for IE, it only returns the first part of the page.
Installing them is (that is, is supposed to be) pretty easy: just go to the above-linked plug-in homepage from inside Webby (you can use the “Get More Extensions” link in the Extensions tab in Options) and click the extension you’d like to download and install. It’ll ask you whether it’s allowed to install it; after the install, you’ll need to restart the browser.
The problem with these extensions is that they (still?) don’t exist on the homepage of the developer. Webby states them to have been installed but, in reality, nothing is downloaded (you can also check this in the \Program Files\Webby\extensions\ directory in the file system of your Pocket PC if interested). To make sure I'm not missing something, here’s a HTTP-level communication trace (two pairs of requests from Webby / PIE and two 404 Not found answers (that is, there indeed isn't anything in there; not even the linked extensions remote folder!) from the server): 1 2 3 4.
That is, you will want to wait until this problem is fixed, which I’ll surely report of. In the meantime, don’t even try to download extensions - it's just a waste of time because nothing will be downloaded.
Button support
The second most important new feature (which I probably missed the most from earlier versions) is the hardware button support.
As can be seen in this and this screenshots, the most important functionality (Back/ Forward; Previous/Next tab, Close everything but the current one / the current only; Full Screen toggle) is accessible.
It only allows for configuring six buttons on all PPC models (with wildly varying number of buttons). It seems all Pocket PC developers should read all my articles as I’ve elaborated on how all the available hardware buttons can be (very easily!) read out of the Registry more than one year ago ( Where does the PPC Registry store button mapping info - a tutorial (alternatives: PPC Magazine, BrightHand; make sure you also follow the link to More Programmers'/Hackers' Stuff, along with some cool Pocket Loox 7xx Hold Button Tips: More on Pocket PC Hardware Buttons for more info.)
Unfortunately, there is no way of for example using the tap-and-hold buttons of the WM5-upgraded hx4700 or the Pocket Loox 720. It’s not possible to define additional functionality for WM5 softkeys, unlike in PIEPlus 2.0+ and MultiIE 4.0+ either. However, it’s possible to enable WM5 softkeys for menus as can be seen in here: 1 2. This is certainly good news.
Also, it should be noted that the free version only supports two button redefinitions.
Cons
View: One Column mode still not supported
One of my biggest grieves with the past versions was the native support for the One Column mode of the underlying PIE. Unfortunately, this hasn’t changed.
This means if you must work on the full (unstripped) version of a page and, therefore, can’t use any Web compression / content stripper / online cruncher service like Skweezer, MobileLeap, Google Mobile or WebWarper (the four services Webby 2.6 supports out of box), you may end up having to switch to the normal view mode, which will result in a need for horizontal scrolling on a LOT of pages. This is a VERY bad bug in Webby!
Lack of context menus
Unfortunately, there are still no image / link / page context menus as can be seen for example here (which shows clicking an image link will bring up the traditional PIE context menu and nothing else).
This means you need to access all advanced functionalities like link target saving from the main menus. It’s only saving images (in WM5 IEM’s; it’s not available in pre-WM5 PIE’s) that is accessible via the context menu – as with IEM. Please also consult the Download Bible for more info on all these questions.
Verdict
The plug-in architecture is indeed promising. Too bad it doesn’t work yet. Hope it’s only a temporary problem, which will be fixed really soon. When it’s fixed, I’ll return to testing and let you know about how these plug-ins fare agains the competition (for example, the Address Bar plug-in against PIEPlus / MultiIE's comparable capabilities).
Plug-in problem aside, I still don’t really recommend this title over the latest version of stand-alone browsers like Minimo, Opera Mobile or, to a lesser extent, NetFront or Thunderhawk.
The same stands for PIEPlus, which I consider currently by far the best PIE plug-in. The latter is just far more capable (just compare their capabilities one by one!) and faster (don’t be mislead by the seemingly small download times: Webby uses the compression / content stripping service Skweezer by default; this is why it seems to be faster than any else PIE plug-in by default) than Webby.
Recommended links
The Web Browsers category in the Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine's Expert Blog

REVIEW: Free tabbed Internet Explorer plug-in Maximus 1.0

The built-in Internet Explorer in the Windows Mobile operating system has always lacked multi-tabbed operation. There have been several third-party solutions to the problem, the latest being the free Maximus. Read on to find out how it fares against other Internet Explorer add-ons!
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Availability, compatibility
Unfortunately, the developer’s homepage doesn’t have a dedicated page on the application – only the statement “Open multiple tabbed pages inn a single browser! A fully functional web browser similar to Internet Explorer which allows you to open an unlimited amount of web pages at one time.”.
The direct download link is this HERE. Unzip the file and either transfer Maximus.ARM.CAB to your Pocket PC and click it there or start Maximus.exe on your desktop.
Installation
Upon install, if you, instead of directly transferring Maximus.ARM.CAB to your Pocket PC and clicking it there (the recommended way of installing the application), start Maximus.exe to install, make sure you untick “UnityRuntime” in the installer (as can be seen in here) because:
it would install the original version of CF2, which is NOT recommended any more. Make sure you get CF2 SP1 instead. It’s the latest version of CF2 and is much better than the one shipped with Maximus. See this article for more info on downloading.
what’s more, the package contains the WM5-only CF2 CAB file and, therefore, can’t be installed on WM2003(SE) devices.
After installation, the app must be started by just tapping the new Maximus icon (the app is, technically, not a simple PIE plug-in but an add-on which must be separately started, just like ftxPBrowser or Webby).
Pros
Using it doesn’t result in a considerable speed hit when loading new pages, as opposed to some other Compact Framework-based products like Webby. I’ve done some benchmarks with my traditional Web transfer benchmark page. While it took Maximus 30 seconds to fully load the page, the "barebone" PIE spent 24...27s in default (and 17..22 s in One Column) mode on my A12 AKU2.3 Dell Axim x51v. (Note that AKU 2 introduced a big loading speed increase; this is why the plain PIE loading speed is much better than in this pre-AKU2 A06 test). That is, the speed difference is about 15%, which is negligible
It’s free and if you really don’t have anything else but must have tabbed browsing support, you may want to use it. (But, then, the free version of Webby, Opera Mini, Minimo or, if you have a Pocket PC with an operating system prior to WM5, ftxPBrowser may prove much more useful.)
Cons
It really doesn’t add anything to the underlying PIE, except for new tabs, and even hides the original menus (more on this later)
It doesn’t support WM5 softkeys
it doesn’t add any new page / link / image context menu options. For example, the lack of link context menu options means, as it’ll open a link in the current frame, you can’t easily open a new frame for a new link
It hides the original IE menus. This means you won’t be able to access even basic functionality from inside Maximus. It’s impossible to change view mode (it defaults to the “Default” view mode, which isn’t very useful with many pages where the “One column” mode would be preferable); you can’t turn off/on loading pictures, you can’t hide the address bar, the text size (zoom percentage) etc.
It doesn’t have access to the persistent URL history, unlike ALL other alternates – it only lists URL’s entered in the last session
While the context menus have the Full Screen option, it doesn’t work
No access to favorites (a BIG problem!)
To get a picture of how simple its menus are, here are some screenshots: 1 2 3.
Error dialogs / messages don’t contain any text; an example can be seen here
Verdict
Definitely not recommended. Even the free version of Webby is far better if you really want to stick with Compact FW 2-based solutions (I wouldn’t). Currently, I don’t think you should even think about installing it. Hopefully a subsequent version will offer far more functionality.
Recommended links
Do check out my other Web browser reviews in the Web Browsers category in the Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine's Expert Blog.

Sprite Software to release a backup (file) browser tool - at last!

Anyone having read my Definitive Pocket PC Backup Bible knows how useful it can be to be able to restore / extract files and, sometimes, WindowsCE databases and registry from Pocket PC backup files on the desktop computer.
Much as, as can clearly be seen based on my Backup Bible, all major Pocket PC backup solutions support cross-restoration (restoring a given file / database to another Pocket PC (model)) on the Pocket PC itself - and Sprite Backup is quite excellent at granularity it allows to set what should be restored -, there may be cases when extracting files and other information on the desktop (as opposed to Pocket PC’s) may be highly useful. For example, when you don’t have (other) Pocket PC’s around (that is, you cant’ directly restore your stuff to your / any other Pocket PC) or, when you quickly need to restore a given file / directory and don’t want to copy the entire file on a storage card, insert it in your Pocket PC and slowly find the file / data you’d like to restore with the, compared to the desktop PC, a bit less efficient Pocket PC input methods.
Sprite Backup has always severely lacked such a tool (I’ve, after scrutinizing the inner format of the Sprite Backup backup files, coded one for myself some 1.5 years ago but haven’t released it to the public to avoid copyright infringement problems), unlike some of the alternates, most importantly, ActiveSync and one of the two new backup titles released last year, Spb Backup. Now, this will change.
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Availability
The tool isn’t publicly available yet. However, it will be released REALLY soon. Make sure you bookmark THIS and regularly check it for the news. Also, make sure you follow the Sprite Backup forums (they’re, as far as all the Pocket PC backup-based forums are concerned, the best and the Sprite folks are really responsive) for related discussions (currently, there still isn’t any – it’s only some (today’s) posts that it is mentioned; see for example this).
Compared to the alternates…
When compared to the ActiveSync-based STGViewer (v0.2 Beta) and HPC Vault (alternative download link here) (also see this article) and Spb Backup Unpack tool, it certainly excels at some areas (for example, restoring individual files as opposed to, say, the Spb product), while, unfortunately, it doesn’t deliver at other areas; most importantly, registry restoration.
In the following comparison chart, I quickly compare the currently available four solutions:
(If you would like to see the original HTML (with clickable links), click this.)
Registry restoration – is it needed? Definitely!
As far as registry restoration is concerned, cross-Pocket PC registry restoration is very dangerous and, in most cases, won’t work at all – unfortunately, you’ll end up adding the cross-restored keys/values to your already-existing Registry contents (also with massive overwriting of previous values). This is in stark contrast with file (you can selectively restore any files and can make beforehand you save the old contents of the target file, if any) and WinCE database cross-restoration (particularly with tools that allow for even selecting what WinCE database to restore). With the latter, in general, no problems will happen when you cross-restore a WinCE database to another Pocket PC, particularly if it’s a third-party database – see this (continued here) thread for a real-world problem and its solution where this capability has turned out to be very important with the Pocket PC application Cash Organizer.
None of the Pocket PC-based restore tools are able to do selective registry restoration or has a registry tree browser – that is, the only way to, say, look up a given value is restoring the entire Registry to your Pocket PC. It’s only the Spb Unpack tool that is able to unpack the contents of the Registry to the desktop PC (but, unfortunately, in a format that can’t be directly imported to the Pocket PC without manual conversion first).
WinCE databases; restoring PIM stuff
In addition to the above-mentioned case of Cash Organizer, I’ve, as a well-known contributor & helper on many-many Pocket PC forums, several times been faced with the need to restore for example Contacts data from backup files. I’ve even written several tools that do this; for example, here’s my tool for the HTC Xbackup and here’s for Microsoft ActiveSync backup files.
This means extracting these kinds of data (into, say, a CSV file) would be highly useful on the desktop. Too bad none of the apps do this; for example, the Spb Backup unpacker doesn’t even try to peek into the pim.vol file of WM5 devices. This, unfortunately, means you must restore these databases to a real Pocket PC.
Pros
At last it exists!
Free and works
Encountered no problems through testing
Drag and drop support to desktop target; Spb's tool only supports full extraction as can be seen in this directory listing
Exports to both the Pocket PC and the desktop
Cons
No registry / database support, which is only partially alleviated by Sprite’s cross-restoration capabilities; in this respect, some of the alternatives are somewhat better
Unable to read old iPAQ Backup files
Verdict
However much this utility is definitely lacking (again, no Registry / WinCE database extraction is possible), it is definitely a nice add-on for, in many respects, the best (and, accordingly, most expensive…) Pocket PC backup suite.
If you’re a Sprite Backup user, don’t hesitate to download it as soon as it becomes available. If you still try to decide which backup application to get, the introduction of Sprite Explorer is also an advantage over the alternatives.
I really hope registry / WinCE database extraction will be implemented some day.
Other links of interest
Just Another Mobile Monday’s review
Other backup-related news
Note that, in the meantime, Sunnysoft Backup Manager has also received a major (which also means you need to pay for the upgrade if you’ve a registered 3.7 user) version bump & update. So far, I haven’t had the time to really thoroughly test it; will try to do this in the near future though. Sunnysoft also promises some decent enterprise features like FTP and HTTPS file synchronization and Enhanced synchronization with Desktop, which will, hopefully, become available Q1 2007.
@Menneisyys
Are you refering to this tool?
*** link taken out by Menneisyys***
on this page
*** link taken out by Menneisyys***
(Menneisyys' remark: Sorry, after a quick consultation with the Sprite folks, I toook out the links because they linked in not publicly available product pages (they're only meant for paying customers)).
Lucas0511 said:
@Menneisyys
Are you refering to this tool?
on this page
Yup. Strange it's available tehre but not on the main product page itself. Thanks for the link; will update the article some time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Yet another review & comparison update: Web browser Teashark

As with UCWEB (see my new review HERE), it was more than one and a half year ago that I’ve reviewed the (then) current version of the Java-based Web browser, Teashark. In order to be as up to date as possible, I deemed it necessary to properly test the current version in order to see whether it’s any good and how it compares to the alternative browsers.
To make a long story short, I heavily recommend this browser if you have a non-touchscreen phone (for example, a Windows Mobile Standard smartphone or a Symbian phone) and, for some reason, you don’t want to use Opera Mini (or especially need the goodies Teashark has, while Opera doesn't: italic support and the sophisticated copy-from-webpages come into mind). Many of the shortcomings of the old version have been fixed; most importantly, the bad rendering engine. The new one is Webkit-based, which certainly shows: while one of the alternatives, UCWEB, completely fails at rendering most real-world Web pages retaining their original layout, Teashark very rarely fails to do the same. Two examples:
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(DPReview forums – correctly rendered)
(the W3C page: here, you always need to press left/right to align the differently indented original text. This works in exactly the same way as in Opera Mini.)
If you have a touchscreen-based phone or PDA, on the other hand, you most probably will want to ignore this title: it makes absolutely no use of the touchscreen. As, otherwise, the browser is very nice, I really hope this issue is fixed before long so that Windows Mobile or Symbian S60 5th ed users will be able to use their touchscreens.
Unfortunately, as with UCWEB, it doesn’t have a BlackBerry-compliant version. (The JAR file can be installed and runs, but it can’t be used as it still presents a three-softkey-based menu, which is pretty much far away from the one menubutton-based approach of BlackBerry. This also means none of the menu items can be accessed – all you see when you press the hardware menu button on the BB is “Close”.)
Teashark has several goodies the other browsers really should implement:
- Excellent and very easy copy/paste support – much cleaner than that of UCWEB
- Support for italic characters (it also supports bold but not underline)
- It even supports “previous” in “find in page”
- Pretty well thought-out thumbnail-based quick switching between in-memory (and recently visited) pages
Compared to Opera Mini, it has some major problems, though:
- No touchscreen support at all – a MAJOR drawback!
- Much fewer Web pages can be kept in-memory
- Somewhat worse Web standards compliance (still much better than that of UCWEB, though.) Note that you will encounter for example dropdown list selection problems (with, for example, THIS demopage - give it a try if you have an old Jeodek [on Windows Mobile]! You’ll see you won’t be able to select any item) with old Esmertec Jeodek versions (for example, the one coming with the HTC Vox / s710 smartphone). You WILL want to upgrade to a newer Jbed version; for example, I haven’t encountered similar problems with the latest Jbed version, 20090217.5.1R2 available for download HERE (direct link to download) – or, if you want a version with multiple midlet execution support, 20081203.2.1 linked from the same post (direct link to download).
Comparison chart
You'll want to very thoroughly scrutinize the chart - as with most my articles, a lot more information is contained in it than in the article. It's HERE. Note that the chart has info on all the other Java-based browsers too – and a lot of never-before published tips and tricks on, for example, getting a signed version of Opera Mini.
Made the thread temporarily sticky, mostly because of the useful contents of the chart really worth checking out.
Something worth considering when it comes to Teashark (and, to somewhat lesser degree, UCWEB) as opposed to BOLT and, most importantly, Opera Mini (the two latter browsers have a well-known company behind them with [as long as BOLT is considered, I refer to its predecessor, Thunderhawk] long years of working without any reports on their “listening to” the HTTP traffic). After all, don’t forget that all these four browsers (except for UCWEB’s non-Java versions) use a central server doing the reformatting & compression work for the requested pages and, therefore, eavesdropping, at least in theory, might be possible. Let me cross-post GldRush98’s post (original at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=1522658&postcount=5 ).
Cross-posting this from a post I made on the Opera Mini forums, since this community is more likely to understand my issues with this browser...
There is something fishy with Teashark.
THINK ABOUT IT.
1) They appeared out of no where with a Java app.
2) There is NO linkable parent company on their site. Can't look up domain registration, can't find out ANY other information AT ALL about them and who they are.
3) They have absolutely NO way to relate back to the community. They have a "blog" run on a wordpress backend. That right there should throw up some red flags. Why would a "company" or WHATEVER they are that is developing a Java browser (with no ads in it mind you), use Wordpress as a blog backend? That just makes no sense to me
4) How exactly does this company make their money? Something tells me you don't want to know if you've been using their browser. They have no advertisements on their site or in the browser. They have to be making money somewhere, because they wouldn't have these proxy servers serving up loads of bandwidth for free. Where is their money coming from? A parent company? Who?
5) Their whole website is fishy. Aside from complete lack of information, why do all links on their site link you to port 8080 on their server? Why aren't they running over standard port 80? Something is odd about that alone.
6) The vendor tag in the app is labeled as "Vendor". Ummmm... what?
Their website traces back to: "IP 69.72.142.98 is from United States(US) in region North America"
That is about the only traceable information I can figure out.
It creeps me out that this mysterious company pops up out of no where and throws this "browser" app out there, with absolutely no effort to disseminate who they are. What is even creepier is that people have downloaded this app and are using it with ZERO knowledge of who this company is or who is behind them!

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