Database Info

REVIEW: New, 3.2.00 version of TomeRaider3

TomeRaider is a well-known book/dictionary/reference work reader having a lot of useful application areas, most important of them being reading Wikipedia on your PDA. As I definitely wanted to add a complete, comparative review of TomeRaider to my series of dictionary / reference roundups (links in the article below), I spent quite a lot of time evaluating it.
Note that in this article I both compare the brand new (3.2.00) version to the previous (3.1.30) one and to the dictionary / reference alternates. Yeah, killing two birds with one stone
Also note that I directly compare TomeRaider3, as far as its dictionary engine is concerned, in the Definitive Roundup of All Pocket PC Dictionaries Part I – WordNet-based English Dictionaries. You will also want to check out the comparison chart in there to see how it compares to the alternates as a dictionary engine.
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Availability, compatibility
It’s available here, compatible with all Pocket PC platforms (yes, even MIPS/SH3 Pocket PC’s – I’ve even tested it on my MIPS Casio E-125 and was very happy with what I saw) and costs $38.00. The upgrade is free for all 3.x users – previous registration numbers will work.
What’s new compared to the previous, 3.1.30 version?
There have been major changes in mostly the GUI and how the screen dragging mode works.
The new version no longer has the icons at the bottom and the taskbar at the top – it defaults to full screen mode. This also means the Action button (or, the center switch of the Jog dial, if present) no longer switches between the normal and full screen mode, but between the index (subject) and the article view. (Also see the “Navigation” section for more information on how the hardware controls work.)
Now, all the necessary functionality is available via the additional icons on the vertical scrollbar and the context menu (there was no context menu in the previous version, except for a single “Copy” item after selecting some text; the same stands for the old vertical scrollbar, which was a plain one without additional icons / functionality). For example, in this screenshot showing in-text searching, the previous/next icons are also placed on the vertical scrollbar, along with the previous/next article icons (the latter are always displayed. That is, you don’t end up having to tap-and-hold and, then, click the needed menu item).
In cases, the new GUI is highly advantageous. For example, in the old version (as opposed to the new one – see below for more info), if you explicitly enable the Page dragging mode in Options, you won’t be able to click links and, if you really want to do that, you need to click the Opt icon again, then, Preferences and, then, disable the “Page dragging” checkbox and click OK. This is four clicks as opposed to one click in the new version (the “T” (“Text Select Mode”) icon, which is always displayed on the scrollbar).
Also, as has already been pointed out, another great advantage of the new version is the ability to click links in page dragging mode too. This has long been waited for.
Incidentally, the new version is much smaller (613k as opposed to 1800k) than the previous. Part of this can be easily explained by the missing skins and icons (the new version contains no fancy icons / skins), part of it by missing functionality (for example, the removed history list).
What are the newly-introduced problems and bugs?
There is an unfortunate bug in the new version. While the old version had absolutely no problems with rendering text, the new does (see how the word “Soviet” is rendered). This isn’t a VGA problem: it is equally a problem on QVGA devices as can also be seen in this screenshot. Also, you can’t fix it by changing the character size and/or switching screen orientation either and is also present on all operating systems (yeah, checked them all - even Pocket PC 2000! That is, on the WM2003SE Pocket Loox 720 , the WM5 Dell Axim x51v (A12), the WM5 hx4700 (2.01), the WM5 HTC Wizard, the Pocket PC 2002 iPAQ 3660 and the Pocket PC 2000 Casio E-125).
This problem is clearly related to the application’s using a non-native scrollbar (remember the beta1 version of Opera Mobile? It had exactly the same problem with its non-native text input area). Earlier versions used native Windows scrollbar controls (widgets); this doesn’t. This may be the reason the end of the last words are often invisible (and they can’t be scrolled, even if you enable the horizontal scrollbar in Preferences).
Finally, I seriously miss the backward / forward history. It seems it has been completely removed from the new version.
Note that the application is still (as with older versions) unable to copy any text to the clipboard on WM5 devices. When you select some text (if you switch off the default Screen drag mode with the T icon), you will end up being unable to copy it to the clipboard – there is just no “Copy” context menu item. It’s only on pre-WM5 devices that you can copy text to the clipboard.
What is still missing?
Unfortunately, there is still missing any advanced index searching (“Subject Lookup” – in older versions, “Quick Find”) capabilities. Everything it offers is plain character matching. It doesn’t even offer in-string (substring) searching (some dictionaries like those of ReferenceToGo refer to this as ‘Smart word list’), which is common in many (also) Pocket PC-based dictionaries. For example, Revolutionary Software Front’s reference/dictionary applications (Lextionary, Lexipedia) etc. are far better in this respect.
The lack of fuzzy search and typo / spelling mistake correction capabilities is a pain in the back too. In this respect, for example Lexipedia (please see ROUNDUP: Read / browse WikiPedia on your Pocket PC for more information), Lextionary or ReferenceToGo’s Dictionary and Encyclopedia Personal Reader (DEPR) are far superior to TomeRaider3.
Also, it still (?) lacks the ability able to open and handle multiple databases at the same time. This is especially important with dictionaries and reference works where you may want to search for a given word in several dictionaries or lexicons at the same time. See for example the example of Paragon’s SlovoEd 2005 and DEPR in the Definitive Roundup of All Pocket PC Dictionaries.
Navigation
Speaking of hardware buttons, it’s worth mentioning how the jog dial (when present) and the D-pad can be used to navigate pages.
On Pocket PC’s equipped with jog dials, it scrolls link-by-link in articles.
Under pre-WM5 operating systems, D-pad scrolls page-by-page. Under WM5, on the other hand, it scrolls link-by-link. You can, however, override this by explicitly overriding the Registry as is explained in the full tutorial & roundup “Windows Mobile 5: How do I modify the default scrolling behaviour of Web browsers?”. This is certainly good news.
In the index, both the jog dial and the D-pad scrolls entry-by-entry.
As far as devices (for example, the HTC Wizard or the Universal) with plain volume sliders (as opposed to jog dials) are concerned, unfortunately, the otherwise excellent SmartSKey (see this article for more information) doesn’t work in articles (which is certainly bad news), only in the index, where it scrolls page-by-page (tested on both the HTC Universal and Wizard). In this respect, the previous and the new version behaves in the same way.
The left/right D-pad buttons move to the previous/next article.
How does it compare to the alternates?
As far as dictionaries are concerned (if we plan to use it as a dictionary), it has both its weaknesses (really restricted searching capabilities, no studying support, no copy to clipboard under WM5, unable to use more than one databases at once, no system-level means of quick word lookup etc.) and strengths (a lot of freeware dictionary databases already available, including a WordNet 2.0-based one etc). I’d say many of the alternate dictionary engines (using the same database) are better (for example, the free MDict); therefore, I would NOT go for TomeRaider3 as a primary dictionary engine. Give MDict, or, as far as WordNet is concerned, Lexisgoo and/or WordBook a try instead first.
As far as reference works are concerned, the situation is completely different. Most of the Pocket PC-based references have a really bad front-end: for example, the PocketDirectory reference works (IMHO) have a definitely worse (for example, it uses pixel doubling on VGA devices) front-end than TomeRaider3. The same stands for Lexipedia, the other, remarkable Wikipedia port – except for the excellent fuzzy search capabilities, it’s much worse (mostly because of the complete lack of HTML support.)
Unlike all of the alternate reference works, it has excellent filtering / categorizing capabilities. It may prove useful in some (pretty restricted) cases – for example, in IMDb categorization. If you want the Internet Movie Database on your Pocket PC, TomeRaider3 is the way to go - you'll love it.
Verdict for upgraders only
I’m not sure you will want to upgrade to the new version. Particularly the “end of the rows is invisible” problem and the lack of history are clear steps backwards, while bugs like the missing copy to clipboard under WM5 are still not fixed. Let’s wait for a bugfix release, which fixes at least the rendering problems – that is, for the time being, it’s better to stick with version 3.1.30.

Article slightly updated.

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

SOTI Pocket Controller6.02 released+Full phone controller Benchmark Roundup published

Unfortunately for Windows Mobile users, a lot of developers have switched to other platforms (most importantly, iPhone) recently. This is one of the reasons there haven’t been, for example, any decent game releases for Windows Mobile for quite a long time, except for Gameloft’s products only available via mobile phone operators. (Check out PocketGamer.org, the leading Windows Mobile gaming news site for more info. Note that it’s just been gone through a serious facelift, also meaning many of my emulation-related articles have been frontpaged there.)
Unfortunately, almost the same stands for applications and tools. Fortunately, much more established WinMo developers have stuck with the platform than games developers. This also results in the remote device controller applications’ (still) being worked on. These programs let you control your Windows Mobile PDA or handset using the keyboard / mouse of your Windows desktop (or notebook) computer
There has been a lot of changes since I’ve published my last all-in-one roundup of device controller applications. (Note that I’ve also elaborated on these apps, at least as far as capturing screens is concerned, in my all-in-one bible “ALL Secrets of making Pocket PC screenshots – everything you will EVER need to know!“.) Several new applications (My Mobiler, EveryWAN Remote Support Personal Edition and mDesktop) with direct control capabilities have been released in the meantime and the already-existing ones (VirtualCE, SOTI Pocket Controller) have undergone a serious facelift. Now, there are much better and more sophisticated phone controller tools than in 2006, during the writing of the previous roundup; this is why I don’t elaborate on outdated and/or plain not recommended applications like rCE, VNC server-based ones, MS Windows Mobile Developer PowerToys and PDA Controller but only on recent and (with the exception of mDesktop) recommended ones:
VirtualCE 4
My Mobiler
EveryWAN Remote Support Personal Edition
mDesktop
and, last but in no way least, SOTI’s Pocket Controller, which has just been updated to 6.02.
As the last batch of my reviews doesn’t contain a well-documented performance comparison (it was back in 2005 that I published [a Pocket PC Thoughts frontpage] my last performance comparison with real videos), I found it necessary to augment my past reviews with a real performance evaluation.
This also means this roundup doesn’t really compare features and capabilities (just follow the My Mobiler, EveryWAN Remote Support Personal Edition, mDesktop and VirtualCE reviews for a complete overview) but another very important aspect: performance. (Except for a row dedicated to elaborating on the image capturing features of these apps.) When you control your phone with the mouse / keyboard of your desktop (notebook) computer, you’ll want to see as good performance and responsiveness as possible. With QVGA (low-resolution) screens and using standard operating system or utility / application (read: no games), this won’t really be an issue – all the current phone controller apps are able to deliver acceptable to excellent results, performance / responsiveness-wise.
Not so with the CPU usage of the controller app (which does need some handset-side processing – for example, compressing and send the current screen), which should be as little as possible (the more the CPU usage of the controller app, the less responsive the entire phone becomes). There are huge differences between these apps, even in QVGA mode (let alone the far more demanding high-res ones). This is why I paid special attention to measuring the CPU usage of the controllers.
And, there is a question of high-resolution (VGA or WVGA) screens and capturing game screens / videos, which, in cases, put an enormous burden on the phone (CPU usage-wise) and/or don’t result in any kind of usable control.
Test videos; evaluating them
I’ve, in addition to exactly measuring rendition speed with them, I’ve also published the benchmark test videos. They are at http://winmobiletech.com/012009PDAControllers so that anyone can evaluate / review my benchmark results him/herself.
There are several videos there for each of the five apps and the four test cases: two for QVGA, two for VGA and one-one for the GUI rendering speedtest with my benchmark tool elaborated on in my already-linked, 2005 benchmark article and another for the full-screen game animation test with Nanobotz. Note that while I talk about five apps, I offer six sets of videos: with SOTI’s Pocket Controller, for both 6.01 and 6.02 so that you can evaluate the performance differences yourself; note that with the two 6.02 gaming cases, I’ve also published comparative videos of an interim and the final 6.02 build for both QVGA and VGA.
The filename convention of the videos is as follows:
Phone name (either the VGA HTC Universal or the QVGA HTC Wizard) – either Draw (my tool) or Game (Nanobotz) – one of the five[/i] (six/seven) apps.avi
That is, Univ-Draw-mDesktop.avi means it
- has been taken on the Universal
- shows the GUI benchmark results (as opposed to the game)
- using the mDesktop remote controller app.
Evaluating interface speed; slowdown of the device
The easiest way to do this is playing back the counter benchmark videos slowed down and checking out how many figures are left out of the rendering. For example, if, in a video, all you see are 1, 5, 9, 13 etc., then, this means every fourth animation phase is displayed on the desktop.
The easiest way of slowing down the video playback is using Videolan VLC. Being playback and, then, right-click the 1.00x label on the bottom right, to the left of the elapsed/remaining time display. Drag down the slider so that the animation becomes far slower so that you won’t miss any number shown. This way, you can be absolutely sure you’ll see all (even the slightest) changes.
There is another issue some controllers (most notably, mDesktop on both QVGA and VGA and MyMobiler on QVGA) suffer from: the phone slows down because of them running. You can easily spot these problems too: just run the counter tests and check how much time it takes for them to get from 0 to 299. Basically, it should be 9 seconds; with the, in this regard, worse apps (most importantly, mDesktop), this can rise to as much as 14-15 seconds. Note that, in parentheses, I’ve also published these results.
Computing gaming fps
It’s pretty easy to compute the exact speed (frames per second, FPS) of rendering games: just divide the number of frame changes by the total time. For example, the VGA video taken with the current build of Pocket Controller 6.02 is 20 seconds long, and it contains 13 frame changes; that is, the net speed is 13/20 = 0.65 fps. Of course, the bigger, the better.
Key differences between SOTI Pocket Controller 6.01 and 6.02
As is pretty much clear from the performance results, (if you have the money,) the most recommended application is SOTI Pocket Controller. Let’s take a brief look at how the old (6.01; released about two years ago) and the brand new, 6.02 versions compare, performance-wise. (Feature / compatibility-wise, take a look at the list HERE) Note that the comparison chart contains numeric data on both versions (so does the video repository) in the second and third columns, respectively; here, I just emphasize the differences.

First, there is a notable CPU usage decrease on both QVGA and VGA devices. This is a definite plus as Pocket Controller used to have quite high CPU usage on particularly VGA devices. Now, this has been heavily decreased – without a (major) impact on the responsiveness and the speed of rendering the phone screen on the desktop. On the three VGA devices I’ve directly compared the CPU usage on (x51v, Universal – both in the chart – and the HP iPAQ 210, where SOTI 6.01 scored 23% [by clicking around, not significantly higher] and 6.02 scored a more than two times better result: 11% [clicking around: about 25%]), there is a definite CPU usage decrease.
Second, while standard operating system (non-gaming) rendering hasn’t really been sped up (see the counter test), the is a HUGE increase in the VGA gaming capture performance: the new version is about five times(!) better and more responsive. Incidentally, at this stage (and also the QVGA one), I’ve also listed (and published) the performance results (and videos – hence the “final” for the two [QVGA / VGA] gaming videos in the video repository; the other 6.02 videos apply to both builds) of an interim, non-public build, b1385, I’ve been using since January. As can clearly be seen, the biggest difference between b1385 and the current 6.02 build, b1426, is the VGA gaming responsiveness. In this regard, the final, public version of Pocket Controller 6.02 blows everything else out of the water.
Note that while the in-game speed and efficiency remained the same with QVGA and radically increased with VGA, I’ve measured a little bit of speed decrease in both VGA and QVGA with my drawing benchmark (counter) tool. Nevertheless, it’s still way faster than any of the alternatives.
The comparison chart
Note that I haven’t listed subjects that all the tested apps are capable of; for example, Windows 7 compatibility.
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Verdict
Basically, you get what you pay for. That is, if you want to control your VGA device and/or want to capture game screens, you’ll want to bite the bullet and purchase a Pocket Controller license. If, on the other hand, you only have a QVGA device and don’t want to take screenshots of apps / games making 100% use of the CPU of the phone, you can consider sticking with the cheaper (or free) solutions.
As a rule of thumb, however, you should avoid using the desktop controller functionality of mDesktop altogether.

Note that, as has already been mentioned in the mDesktop review, mDesktop isn’t just a phone desktop controller: it’s far-far more than that. Actually, directly accessing the desktop of the phone is just a subfunction of the app. This means you should still consider giving it a try if you, for example, want to quickly edit / write SMS messages, , manage files, make/receive calls, install apps, edit your contact list etc. on your desktop as quickly and conveniently as possible. The test results above only emphasize mDesktop’s phone desktop controller functionalities are definitely worse than that of “true” phone controller apps. The latter, however, don’t offer any ways of the other, direct control facilities.
Also note that the current version of mDesktop is 2.1. The version I’ve reviewed (and compared to Jeyo, its main alternative) in my previous review was 1.0. There have been some major improvements to mDesktop in the meantime (between version 1.0 and 2.1), which I couldn’t elaborate on in this roundup, as it’s all about desktop performance and CPU usage assessment and nothing else.
If you do find mDesktop useful (to, say, access your SMS messages etc.), you still may want to stay away from its direct access functionality and use something else for that purpose (only), particularly if you plan to use this often. This is what the results in the current roundup state. Nevertheless, the *other* functionalities of mDesktop are completely unrelated to the pretty bad-working desktop control and are pretty good. All you need to do is comparing it to Jeyo’s app and decide which way to go.

A brand new review & benchmark & comparison of REDFLY Mobile Viewer: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=3612241#post3612241

New version of the brand new BOLT minibrowser out!

A new version, beta2 (build 0.94), of the BOLT web browser (see the comparison to Opera Mini 4.2 HERE) has just been released. If you’re already a BOLT user, it’ll automatically sense the availability of the new browser and invoke the system-level browser to download the new version; if you’re a new user, you can, as usual, download it from boltbrowser.com . You can do the download from your handset; note that you can provide any name / e-mail address (they can be non-existing or super-short to avoid excessive typing) for the registration.
Enhancements
There are several enhancements worth speaking of. First, it received a newer, even larger, 3XLarge character set. This uses huge characters - on my BlackBerry 8800 even bigger than those of Opera Mini. These characters, however, are Bitstream's own ones; this means they don't support non-Western characters either, unlike Opera Mini using the non-small character set. The Bitstream folks should consider using the dynamic replacement algorithm I've described in my Web Browser Internationalization Guide; that is, use the closest equivalent of each non-western character to be able to render at least non-cyrillic East-European languages like Polish or Czech - these languages remain pretty readable when the closest letter is used instead of their own original.
The new character set is a god-send for high-resolution (VGA / WVGA users); people with low-resolution screens (like QVGA) will very rarely (if ever) need it.
The new version is stated to be working (scrolling) much faster on the BlackBerry platform than the previous one. This is true: now, it takes far less time (3-6 seconds at most per page - first a quick page jump to right with "6" and, then, fine-tuning with the scrollball) to correctly position the viewport over the real text body on my BB 8800. This is still somewhat slower than Opera Mini (where you, in most cases, don't need to touch the scrollball at all - simply pressing 6, that is, right, nicely positions the viewport over the text) but is indeed a huge enhancement over the last version.
The Bitstream folks have also fixed the major DPReview forum rendering issues I've reported in my previous article. Now, I couldn't find any DPReview forum post having too long rows, unlike with the previous version, not even when using the largest character set. The following two (VGA portrait – note that the content is rendered OK on my QVGA Landscape BlackBerry 8800 as well) screenshots show this (original thread HERE; compare the shots with those of beta1):
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(3XLarge)
(XXLarge)
Nevertheless, I still found some other pages incorrectly rendered: the first row of the individual articles on my blog force the reader to scroll horizontally. The W3C page is rendered even worse than with the previous beta. With the older version, “only” bulleted lists had the tendency to be extend over the (invisible) right part of the screen; with the new one, standard text rows too. You need to heavily reduce the character size (which may not be very easy on eyes) to fix this issue. The following three screenshots, with descending character sizes (from XXLarge to Large) show this in practice:
YouTube and other Web videos
In my previous review, I haven’t elaborated on the multimedia features; most importantly, BOLT’s being able to transcode and play back (in a local, 3gp-compatible media player) online videos. Using a local player means you will have a definitely better experience than with SkyFire, which, sometimes, is only able to present a slideshow of the frames (sometimes – at least in Europe – without any sound) because of the much less multimedia-friendly client-server transfer method.
BOLT’s central server converts Web videos into the 3gp format compatible with all current phones (but, by default, not Windows Mobile Classic – that is, not phone-enabled Pocket PC’s). When you click the Play button in a video (see the left button at the bottom on the following screenshot), it starts transcoding the video and also displays a message stating this:
After you press Launch, your standard Web browser is invoked, and, through that, the media player (if the .3gp format is registered, that is.) Note that, at the time being, it only seems to convert the first 1:25 minutes, not the entire video (if it’s longer). and the resulting quality is far from perfect. Also note that neither BlackBerry nor Windows Mobile are able to play back the videos in streaming mode (without downloading and saving them first). If you select “Open” in BlackBerry’s Web (instead of “Save”), the media player will be invoked and you’ll presented with a “The current media can not be played from the network. Save it first for local playback” message. With Windows Mobile, the title will always be fully downloaded and saved first, and only after that will the media player be invoked (depending on whether you do allow the automatic invocation).
Windows Mobile and signed versions
There are four different versions of BOLT for non-BlackBerry operating systems (for the BlackBerry, only an unsigned version exists). The dual signed version works great on Windows Mobile under Jbed; I’ve tested it under both version 20070802.2.1 and 20080222.3.1. That is, you don’t need to use the unsigned version with all its dialogs – at least not when using Jbed as your MIDlet manager.
Conclusion
It definitely became better, particularly on non-touchscreen enabled platforms (for example, the BlackBerry) – now, scrolling to the text is much faster. However, there’re still some very serious bugs regarding text rendering (see the incorrectly rendered rows’ screenshots above). I really hope they’ll be fixed.
Also, I really hope the following issues will be fixed:
- Adding full Italic and bold support
- Adding multipage support (as with Opera Mini) to avoid having to reload pages when you, for example, press Back.
- Allowing for some kind of an online favorite synchronization (like Opera Link)

Ridiculously fast
Holy **** this thing is fast.
I mean seriously, they must be rendering most of the stuff on their servers (a la Opera 9.7) and then uploading the page to us as an image file or something.
For example, the time it takes to FULLY load a couple of the websites is as follows:
Nytimes.com:
Iris Browser (1.1.6) = 1 min 20 secs
Opera Mobile (9.5) = 1 min 13 secs
Bolt = 9 secs
Just for kicks: Desktop (Opera 10.00 1) = 2 secs
9 seconds!
Engadget.com:
Iris Browser (1.1.6) = 1 min 45 secs
Opera Mobile (9.5) = 1 min 30 secs
Bolt = 9 secs
Just for kicks: Desktop (Opera 10.00 1) = 2 secs
9 seconds, again.
Seriously, this thing is almost as fast as my laptop/desktop
Plus, scrolling throughout a page/site is silky smooth.
No choppiness whatsoever, and also no more checkerboard backgrounds.
They need to tweak the UI to make it more finger-friendly, and allow you to run flash-based videos directly within the browser instead of saving it then playing it with your media player, but aside from that, this is my new browser of choice.
Amazingly fast and renders impeccably well.
Running an HTC Touch Pro on Sprint EVDO-Rev A

REVIEW & COMPARISON: Another Web browser, UCWEB: is it any good?

It was over one and a half year ago that I reviewed the Windows Mobile version of UCWEB, the (then) new, Chinese, multiplatform Web browser.
In the meantime, it has received a lot of additions and enhancements; therefore (and also as an answer to one of my readers at XDA-Developers), I’ve spent some time on evaluating the current version and directly comparing to the other two Java-based browsers, BOLT and Opera Mini.
Note that UCWEB isn’t only Java-based, unlike the other two browsers mentioned. There are native versions for both Symbian and Windows Mobile. These are a bit different from the Java version; for example, they both support bold and italic characters and viewing pages using their original layout (not that it would work in most cases…) As I, in general, prefer writing multiplatform stuff, I decided to thoroughly test all the three (Java, Symbian and Windows Mobile) versions of the browser to see whether it’s worth switching to them from other, competing browsers.
So, you want to know whether it’s worth moving to this browser from your Nokia Web / SkyFire (Symbian S60), Opera Mobile / Iris / Netfront / SkyFire (Windows Mobile), Opera Mini / BOLT (a Java-only feature phone)? The answer is no. In most cases (assuming you very rarely need the unique features of the app: the download manager, the copy features etc.), I’ve found the alternative browsers much better, quicker and cleaner.
Why? You might ask. Let me show you some screenshots. Let’s start with the (dumbest) Java version, which I’ll directly compare to Opera Mini and BOLT, the two main alternatives. (Note that, while this version is indeed the least capable of the three UCWEB versions, it still has some [small] advantages over the Windows Mobile version. For example, it can search for the first occurrence of a string or can close all the tabs except the current one in one step or you can very thoroughly configure its button / key shortcuts.) Let’s see what character styles / sizes it can render:
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
Wow! Nothing at all! Now, let’s take a look at Opera Mini’s doing the same:
…and, finally, BOLT:
While BOLT has certain drawbacks compared to Opera Mini (e.g., no bold support), it’s still way better than the way UCWEB renders different styles / character sizes.
The W3C compliance results aren’t very nice either. (Here, I show you a screenshot of the native Windows Mobile and Symbian clients as the Java client isn’t capable of rendering pages using their original layout; this would have made its compliance results even worse.):
(Windows Mobile + UCWEB)
(Symbian + UCWEB)
Now, take a look at how Opera Mini renders the page:
BOLT is much nicer too:
Pay attention to not only how the actual square is rendered (how many cells are green, showing compliance with the related test case), but also the other texts on the page. They’re pretty much messed up in UCWEB’s rendering, while perfect when rendered by the other two browsers.
Again, note that the Java version of UCWEB doesn’t support any kind of styling / character formatting (in this case, italic), unlike the native WinMo / Symbian clients, which do.
Native (Symbian / Windows Mobile) versions
The non-Java (that is, native) versions of UCWEB are a bit better (except for some missing functionality, particularly in the Windows Mobile version, like setting the User-Agent or searching for occurrences of a string) than the Java version but can’t really match the best, established browsers on the platform. It’s probably the Symbian version of UCWEB that you might want to consider using but if and only if you’re absolutely sure you’d never use the full page overview, in which the built-in Nokia Web browser is much-much better. On Windows Mobile, almost all other browsers are better, particularly if you hate the one column mode.
Strengths of UCWEB
I’ve already mentioned UCWEB has some unmatched strengths. For example,
- It allows for fine-tuning the hotkeys on Java and Symbian (but, unfortunately, not under Windows Mobile). Very few alternative browsers do the same (and definitely not Java ones); for example, Opera Mobile.
- It has a built-in download manager. If you download a lot of stuff off the Web and would prefer doing this in the background, UCWEB is the way to go. Unless, of course, you are on a platform where there already are browsers with download managers or downloader add-ons for existing Web browsers (see my dedicated reviews). For example, on Windows Mobile, there are several of them.
- It natively supports multitabs – a huge omission in, for example, the built-in Internet Explorer Mobile in Windows Mobile. (Nevertheless, I still think – unless you REALLY need some of the other functionalities of UCWEB like the download manager – it’s better to purchase a decent plug-in – MultiIE, PIEPlus or Spb Pocket Plus – for the built-in Internet Explorer Mobile, let alone switching to Opera Mobile 9.5+ completely.)
Comparison chart
It’s HERE and, as usual, is full of screenshots. Note that it also has extensive information on both Opera Mini and BOLT (the latest version of both); in this regard, it’s way better and more informative than the chart in my previous Opera Mini vs. BOLT comparison http://www.smartphonemag.com/cms/blog/9/battle-two-web-minibrowsers-opera-mini-vs-bolt .
Please do consult my other, earlier Web browsing articles, speeches etc. for the meaning of each individual row. I simply don’t have the time to explain things I’ve already shed light on in my earlier articles.
Verdict
While, in some respects (for example, tabbing, download managers, user-agent settings or copy capabilities), it's way ahead of Opera Mini or BOLT (and even some native, non-Java browsers on Symbian / Windows Mobile), it still has major problems.
As a rule of thumb, if you use your Opera Mini almost exclusively in the full layout mode (as opposed to the one column mode) and wouldn’t want to switch back to one column, you’ll hate UCWEB. If you are on a platform with a native UCWEB client (WM or Symbian but not Java-only feature phones), you can use the full layout mode of the browser but I’m absolutely sure sooner or later you’ll disable it, it’s so bad. Even the lowest-quality Web browsers on Windows Mobile (for example, the built-in Internet Explorer Mobile) are far better at rendering ordinary Web pages and reflowing text so that they are readable without any horizontal scrolling. On Symbian S60, Nokia’s Web is way-way better, particularly now that all new(er) models and/or firmware upgrades have Flash Lite 3.1.
It’s only on Java-only phones that you might want consider switching to it. I, however, only recommend this if and only if you absolutely need its unique features the better alternatives (Opera Mini or BOLT) aren’t capable of: copying from pages; quick tab switching on touchscreen-only devices; multipage support (where BOLT – but not Opera Mini! – seriously lacks), support for non-Western languages (which BOLT isn’t capable of) etc. Otherwise, I simply don’t see any point in using it as your main browser, particularly not if you don’t want to stick to the confined one column view mode: both Opera Mini and BOLT have way better rendering engines.
Currently, I only recommend UCWEB to the developers of Opera Mini (and BOLT). After adding the, in my opinion, most important features (first of all, italic support and copy support the way UCWEB does – both are, programmatically, pretty easy), the other niceties (for example, the tabbing system, which is a god-send for touchscreen-only people) could be added to Opera Mini.

Perspective
Well, being the tester he is Menneisyys raised interesting points about the browser. Points that I did not think of. Interesting review.

I downloaded the CAB and it's in Chinese language, does anyone know how to switch the language?