Dang’s Weblog

I just realized today as I was actually using the web browser on my 770 that I almost never use it that way. Web browsing is the primary purpose Nokia put to the 770; it’s the reason for all the various design choices that they made. And I love my 770. I use it all the time. In fact, I’ve used it more than all the rest of the PDAs I’ve owned, put together. So, why don’t I use it to browse the web?

Well, there are several reasons. The first reason is that I rarely actually connect it to wireless, unless I’m planning on doing extended online activities. This is because connecting to wifi is slow. This is not the fault of the 770 (although they could proably speed it up a lot…) but just a characteristic of wifi. Everything takes a long time to connect. This is exacerbated by the presence applet going online as soon as the internet comes up, which just pauses the whole 770 for a while pegging the CPU. Thus, I’m not likey to jump online for just a second to check something, because it will likely take longer to connect than it will to actually check things.

Well, that’s not quite true. This is because of the next reason: the browser sucks. I’m sorry Opera and Nokia, but browsing the web on the 770 is a horrible experience. The browser is slow, bloated (Yay, out of memory with several pages open…), and missing features like tabs that even IE has now. I just cannot bring myself to use it as a web browser. Sure, I can see web pages normally, due to the wonderful, amazing screen. But I can’t get to the web pages in any sane amount of time. If I’m in the kitchen, I’m much better off walking into the living room, picking up my laptop, googling and reading and coming back, even if my 770 is already on the internet. This is dispite the instant on, which is one of my favorite features of the 770.

There are a number of things that feel horribly slow with the browser. The worst by far is startup. I click the browser button, and pretty quickly, the browser appears. Yay! Except I can’t use it. It sits and sits for maybe 5-10 seconds, completely unresponsive while it’s doing, um, something. Even if I set it to have a blank start screen, rather than the stupid captive portal screen it ships with, it takes the same amount of time to start up. At some point, it starts accepting clicks and queueing them, causing me to be in some limbo of keypresses when it does come up.

The next problem is rendering speed. Even pages which have almost no content to download (like the google front page) take ages to render. Pages with actual stuff on them are achingly slow. So slow that I frequently just give up. I find myself limited to the few sites that load and render at a reasonable speed, namely google and wikipedia.

Then, there’s the lack of tabs. I realize tabs could be hard to do in the UI, but they are doable; other apps have done them. And tabs are not optional for my browsing habits. I’ve tried to use separate windows instead, which should be similar (due to the task bar on the side) right? No. There’s no feedback in the task bar as to what’s in a window; switching windows feels slow; opening several windows eats all my memory; it’s just not a viable alternative. And, I can’t just navigate back and forth, due to the rendering speeds noted above.

All this is not to say that the 770 is slow. As I said above, I use it all the time. Mine is so beat up from being in my pocket for more than a year that it looks like it shouldn’t be working anymore. And, for my uses, it’s not slow. It doesn’t feel slow, it doesn’t exasperate me when I use it, like web browsing does.

So, what I do use it for? Well, my favorite use is reading e-books (yay fbreader!). I use it for playing games. I keep a calendar on it (but no alarms… ) I have task lists. I have a file that tracks all my gas usage for my car (soon to be a nice program…) I keep shopping lists. I use it as a last-ditch remote ssh platform. I have a weather bug. It’s a killer movie platform (although I generally only watch moves on the airplane…). The list goes on.

I adore my 770. It’s the best gadget I’ve ever owned, and probably number 2 or 3 on the list of ones I’ve used most (behind my mp3 player and my cell phone…). It’s just not a good web browsing platform. It could be, it’s just not.

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