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New J2ME Browser BOLT anyone?

Has anybody got a invite for this new webkit based J2ME browser? http://boltbrowser.com
Is it a threat for opera mini?

Vrtfrank said:
Has anybody got a invite for this new webkit based J2ME browser? http://boltbrowser.com
Is it a threat for opera mini?
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With a bit of fiddling I managed to get it to run.
My first impressions: it's obviously inspired by OM with a similar menu structure. The fonts look terrible (but that probably is a JBED issue). Scrolling is very fast and smooth. Loading pages is very similar to OM, so it certainly is fast enough in that respect as well. A nice feature is the split window capability, showing an overview as well as a detailed view.
I will continue to try it out, and compare it head-to-head with OM. The company claims that it will render pages exactly as on the desktop, the pages I've seen so far bear that out. But I'll continue to test it.
In summary: not bad for a beta
Bernard

Android vs iOS Browser Display

I have a theory that Android uses the CPU exclusively to display a webpage, while iOS loads the rendered result of the current window into the graphics buffer. This would explain the checkerboarding that you get on iOS that you don't on Android, why zooming on Android doesn't blur like iOS does, and why slow scrolling on iOS is so smooth.
Does anyone know if I'm right about this?

iOS display every Website in the same way. Visit a website that is not mobile and u see Android is faster!
iOS display not the whole website so its get good performance.
Edit me if i am wrong

It's actually the other way around. Visit a website that is not mobile and you'll see the Android default browser crawl. The checkerboard pattern on iOS is precisely as you described it: the CPU is not keeping up with page rendering, and it hasn't loaded that part of the web page into the GPU buffer yet. But it only happens to really large web pages with a lot of contents (a tech blog).
The Android UI lacks any sort of GPU acceleration possible, and it's been an ongoing issue for a while. The Android team responded that it wasn't done earlier on because earlier hardware just wasn't enough for it. All current Android devices are effected...
On the bright side, if you want smooth browsing on your Android phone, you can use Opera Mini. I'm using it myself.

Would you like Opera Mini on WP7?

We all know that the IE version in WP7 is based of Internet Explorer 7, and we all know that IE7 sucks.
But, do you think that it would be possible for the Opera team to make a browser for it? Spotify got native access, would Microsoft grant the to Opera too?

i hope they bring opera over to wp7 but initially they said there would not be any other browsers for wp7
but from the youtube videos ive seen the browser on wp7 looks pretty good tabbed browsing and everything loads were pretty speedy we'll have to see how it workks

Don't really care. I would love FireFox though. the beta for Android is pretty nice.

Yeah, Firefox would also be nice, but from earlier actions I don't think that Mozilla will even consider porting Firefox to a non open platform.
The problem with the built in IE is that the rendering engine is outdated, and this can cause problems with websites not rendering correctly.

love the expert opinion in this thread which claims that IE is based entirely on IE7 and that IE on wp7 sucks. sounds like OP has used a real wp7 hardware and IE sucked.
funny it didn't suck for me when opening website's and yet to see rendering problems.
ps - IE on wp7 is based on IE7 and IE8.

It's based on IE7 and IE7 and it sucks indeed.

Sir. Haxalot said:
Yeah, Firefox would also be nice, but from earlier actions I don't think that Mozilla will even consider porting Firefox to a non open platform.
The problem with the built in IE is that the rendering engine is outdated, and this can cause problems with websites not rendering correctly.
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I guess you've used the browser in WP7 and know this for a fact, right?

Many different hands-on experiences with developer phones, say that the browser is actually performing very very well.
Pocketnow.com has made a video comparison with android and iOS, and I gotta say, it removed all of my doubts. Whether it's the best, not sure, but it definitely suffices. Especially once Adobe launches Flash for WP7 and Microsoft fixed Silverlight in the browser - two things we know are going to happen.
Also, from a job opening posted by Microsoft, you can tell that HTML5 is on its way too. However, HTML5 is not important yet as it's not being used for mobile ends yet.

crow26 said:
It's based on IE7 and IE7 and it sucks indeed.
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Way to bash something you haven't used yet.

Opera Mini is a must.
Even if IE7 will perform great on WP7, I don't imagine using full page rendering browser
all the time.
Because of battery and because of bad signal areas!!!
Opera Mobile opens pages always fast no matter what kind of connection you use.
Because it's server rendering machine.
Plus loads 1/10 of actual page size, so saves A LOT of data and energy.

I thought it was based on IE7 and IE8 which is why all the reviews I've seen have actually said its pretty decent.
Not fussed about HTML5 at the mo as even the standards committee has said its not ready for prime time yet

BTW I would like to have BOTH.

doministry said:
BTW I would like to have BOTH.
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I'd like to have both for the reasons doministry said before.
9 time out of 10 I don't care if a page renders correctly, my preference is for pages to render quickly, and such that I can still make sense out of it.
I like text to be one columned so I don't have to scroll left and right to read it. I also like that it's server rendered so it's loads fast. Also I don't have to reload a page when I hit the back button.
For those rare occasions I need a page to render correctly I'd open Opera Mobile, or PIE.

gom99 said:
I'd like to have both for the reasons doministry said before.
9 time out of 10 I don't care if a page renders correctly, my preference is for pages to render quickly, and such that I can still make sense out of it.
I like text to be one columned so I don't have to scroll left and right to read it. I also like that it's server rendered so it's loads fast. Also I don't have to reload a page when I hit the back button.
For those rare occasions I need a page to render correctly I'd open Opera Mobile, or PIE.
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Yes.
BTW on my WM 6.5.3 SE X2 Flash support works much nicer on PIE than Opera Mobile..

Is this still being looked at? Opera mini for WP7?

I would like to have Opera in WP7 and voted that way, but on a second thought I would better have both.
Honestly the only problem I have with IE on WP7 is no text reflow and it's pretty hard to read forums in the phone with no text reflow.

I love opera and its odd having Opera Link Without an Opera Browser they need to get on this.

Interesting if that would ever appear.
I assume Opera will make the move when WP7 will gain any real marketshare.

I don't think Opera will come until there is access to native code. There is no way they could write a browser in silverlight that would even come near the performance of the native browser. Not to mention, they would need to rewrite from scratch instead of utilizing their existing code base.
So yeah, not happening anytime soon.

i don't really cảe since they put IE9 in Mango.
Maybe IE10 too with Appolo or Tango.

Why is scrolling/touch response such a buggy issue with WP7?

Within the native OS its perhaps the best experience I have had across all smartphone platforms. Very well implemented. I just don't understand why almost all(im going with 95% at least) third party apps are so bad with this basic function. It feels like im working with a phone from 7 years ago. Can anyone explain the technical reasons for this problem.

yeahyeahyeah1981 said:
Within the native OS its perhaps the best experience I have had across all smartphone platforms. Very well implemented. I just don't understand why almost all(im going with 95% at least) third party apps are so bad with this basic function. It feels like im working with a phone from 7 years ago. Can anyone explain the technical reasons for this problem.
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Hard to tell. I experienced these same issues. But since there are lots of apps out there that don't seem to suffer from bad scrolling, I'd rather blame the developers of laggy apps than the OS the apps are build on / for. Gotta say that almost every app I use on a regular basis has largely improved with the pre_mango beta.

Most apps are that way because they're poorly translated from android apps, others are in part due to the lack of APIs made available. Overall I think we'll see a lot of improvement when the full release of mango is out.

There are some performance issues with the listbox control in silverlight in Nodo and earlier.. they improved performance of that type of control in Mango.. so developers who are using it should automatically get an improvement.

Yeah, so far this seems to be a non issue in Mango. So just have patience.

The reason comes down to how the developer has implemented the listbox. If the listbox is simple, then it should run smoothly. If it's more complex, it may have a little lag. Often, listboxes have information that is being displayed as it's being downloaded (for example, a Twitter app may download the avatar image whilst the user is scrolling). In a basic implementation, the user may be downloading the image on the same thread as the UI. This results in the UI being unresponsive until the image is fully downloaded and displayed, which explains the lag. Other apps might use a smarter method and download only images that can currently be seen, instead of downloading every image in the listbox.
Even in a perfect implementation, there is a basic design flaw in the current system which means that the handling of the user's touch runs on the same thread as other UI actions. However, this is fixed in Mango as a new, dedicated thread is introduced which handles the user's touch on a separate thread, making it much more efficient out the box. So, in Mango, listboxes will be a lot more smoother

Droid Charge Hardware Acceleration

Does the DC support hardware acceleration for browser apps? I'm using Dolphin HD as my primary Reddit browser with the javascript from the reddit FAQ, and when it opens alot of images in the browser everything becomes very sluggish, doing redraws after you stop moving your finger instead of smoothly as you go.
The iPhone does this SO much better, because of hardware GPU acceleration. Does the DC GPU just not cut it, is it not engaged due to software issues (on Tweakstock 1.2), or maybe its just a lack of support altogether?

cmdrfrog said:
Does the DC support hardware acceleration for browser apps? I'm using Dolphin HD as my primary Reddit browser with the javascript from the reddit FAQ, and when it opens alot of images in the browser everything becomes very sluggish, doing redraws after you stop moving your finger instead of smoothly as you go.
The iPhone does this SO much better, because of hardware GPU acceleration. Does the DC GPU just not cut it, is it not engaged due to software issues (on Tweakstock 1.2), or maybe its just a lack of support altogether?
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Yes it does, latest kernel PBJ does tweak the GPU up a little bit (+25). You can use either smoothness, V6 super charge,Thunderbold scripts or voodoo lag fixed to eliminate browser issue. First try xScope browser see it improves your legginess,.

buhohitr said:
Yes it does, latest kernel PBJ does tweak the GPU up a little bit (+25). You can use either smoothness, V6 super charge,Thunderbold scripts or voodoo lag fixed to eliminate browser issue. First try xScope browser see it improves your legginess,.
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That's not what he was asking. I believe all recent Android revisions support GPU acceleration. It may just be a lack of RAM.
Sent from my SCH-I510 using xda premium

GPU acceleration is only in the stock browser that comes with the shipped ROM. If you modify it, it kills the acceleration from my experience. ICS has a different type of rendering in the browser to make it better/faster than what is available in GB. However, the fact that you're using Dolphin as the browser would have no effect on the browser included in the stock or custom ROM. If you want to know if Dolphin HD does GPU rendering, you'd have to contact them, or ask someone that knows as it would render independent of the included browser.

cmdrfrog said:
Does the DC support hardware acceleration for browser apps? I'm using Dolphin HD as my primary Reddit browser with the javascript from the reddit FAQ, and when it opens alot of images in the browser everything becomes very sluggish, doing redraws after you stop moving your finger instead of smoothly as you go.
The iPhone does this SO much better, because of hardware GPU acceleration. Does the DC GPU just not cut it, is it not engaged due to software issues (on Tweakstock 1.2), or maybe its just a lack of support altogether?
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Actually the iPhone's smoothness, and Gingerbread's lack thereof, has more to do with the way Android was designed. Take a look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eWXxCFmKUlQ#t=40s
Notice how on the Vita, despite the rock-bottom rendering times, the browser runs at 60 fps and is perfectly smooth. The Vita OS prioritizes UI input over all other processes (it's a bit more complicated, but this is a close enough explanation).
Android unfortunately runs UI and apps at the same priority, so when an app is accessing CPU resources the entire system chugs. Also as you install more and more apps, your system will begin to experience increasing lag (although some shell scripts can mitigate the problem). Fixing this is not an easy job. You basically have to redesign the OS from the ground up, breaking compatibility with all previous apps.
This redesign issue is why RIM bought QNX and is now using a completely new operating system on their touch-screen devices, instead of redesigning Blackberry OS. It's also why Microsoft threw away Windows Mobile 6.5 and started from scratch with WP7. Same with Palm and webOS, as well as Nokia and MeeGo (before MSFT infiltrated them).
I was hoping Google would just chuck everything and go for broke with ICS, but they decided to play it safe. I personally would have preferred they do what RIM did with buying and implementing a brand new OS, and then using an emulation layer to enable backwards compatibility with old apps. I don't think running an entire OS in a VM on a device with constrained resources (CPU, GPU, and especially battery) makes a whole lot of sense.
But I guess we'll see how it all pans out in the end.

ambrar12 said:
Actually the iPhone's smoothness, and Gingerbread's lack thereof, has more to do with the way Android was designed. Take a look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eWXxCFmKUlQ#t=40s
Notice how on the Vita, despite the rock-bottom rendering times, the browser runs at 60 fps and is perfectly smooth. The Vita OS prioritizes UI input over all other processes (it's a bit more complicated, but this is a close enough explanation).
Android unfortunately runs UI and apps at the same priority, so when an app is accessing CPU resources the entire system chugs. Also as you install more and more apps, your system will begin to experience increasing lag (although some shell scripts can mitigate the problem). Fixing this is not an easy job. You basically have to redesign the OS from the ground up, breaking compatibility with all previous apps.
This redesign issue is why RIM bought QNX and is now using a completely new operating system on their touch-screen devices, instead of redesigning Blackberry OS. It's also why Microsoft threw away Windows Mobile 6.5 and started from scratch with WP7. Same with Palm and webOS, as well as Nokia and MeeGo (before MSFT infiltrated them).
I was hoping Google would just chuck everything and go for broke with ICS, but they decided to play it safe. I personally would have preferred they do what RIM did with buying and implementing a brand new OS, and then using an emulation layer to enable backwards compatibility with old apps. I don't think running an entire OS in a VM on a device with constrained resources (CPU, GPU, and especially battery) makes a whole lot of sense.
But I guess we'll see how it all pans out in the end.
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I don't think it would require anything close to the level of rewriting that you are talking about here. We are running, for all intents and purposes, a Linux system with some custom UI layers. It's really no more special than Fedora Linux for x86 or PPC in that regard. Currently, I have mine running quite smooth...almost, but not quite, iPhone smooth...just by playing the renice game with process priorities (SysTune is great for this). As an end user with little desire to dig into the code myself, there's only so much I can do, but what I have done has virtually turned this into a new phone. If Google would change the way they handle the priority of certain basic apps...phone, systemui, media, launcher, etc...they could get the UI to that point by default.
The question then comes down to "why?" Why don't they do this? I can only imagine that there are consequences beyond what we as end users see. Me doing this to my individual phone is fine. If I cause issues, I have to deal with them and have no place to complain, but if Google did this by default and it caused issues on even 10 percent of phones, that's a much greater problem. This is the framework they have to work within. A complete rewrite would be completely outside the Android philosophy. They simply can't do it. RIM can do it because they are using proprietary systems, but Android is built around Linux. It's built around open source. We couldn't have the roms we have or the development we do without that, and Google wouldn't have the massive install base they do if they had a proprietary OS.
Ultimately, we as the end users just have to have faith that Google engineers who are far smarter and more knowledgeable than us have done what they have done for a reason, and the fact that they've decided to make this a mostly open system gives us the ability to tinker with it in ways that iOS, RIM, and Microsoft users can't. I'll take that over a complete rewrite any day.

They haven't done a rewrite because it would break backwards compatibility with all apps and require starting from scratch (with regards to features and such). Palm did this with webOS, but unfortunately didn't have the money or expertise to popularize their phones.
Also it's not just the UI priority, it's the whole running in the Dalvik VM issue. Have you ever lightly flinged your phone's screen to long-scroll a list, and noticed periodic "hiccups" that interrupt the smooth scrolling? That's Android's garbage collection, a unique feature of Java. Its purpose is to manage apps' memory allocations (there's more to it... but that's a good enough simplification), but an always on garbage collector drains battery. Since the entire OS runs in the VM, this tends to result in battery issues.
Unlike Palm, Google has the resources and human capital needed to redesign their OS. They also have a ton of carrier relationships across the globe. A redesign is merely a matter of willpower and risk aversion (and time). I'm still hoping Google is planning to wow everyone with a redesign they've been secretly working on for years.

*facepalm*
Apparently Google may end up releasing Android 5.0 in Q2 of this year: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120215PD209.html
I hope the report's suggestion that Google is appealing for dual-boot tablets isn't true. It would just seem... like why would the average person care about dual-booting? I know I would personally like it, but otherwise I doubt the second OS will see much use.

Dual boot to what?
Sent from my SCH-I510 using xda premium

kvswim said:
Dual boot to what?
Sent from my SCH-I510 using xda premium
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Chrome OS
Sent from my HTC Vision using XDA App

xT4Z1N4TRx said:
Chrome OS
Sent from my HTC Vision using XDA App
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Chrome OS?? chrome is a browser!. Dual boot between Android 5.0 and Windows 8 OS without shutting down the phone.

buhohitr said:
Chrome OS?? chrome is a browser!. Dual boot between Android 5.0 and Windows 8 OS without shutting down the phone.
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Actually, google has been making a x86 OS called Chromium. Google chromebooks. It's basically a minimalistic laptop with chromium designed for cloud computing. It uses chrome as the browser, google docs for office etc.