[Device Reviews and Information] Menneisyys:
Page Pilot

In addition to the, in my opinion, pretty useless visual bookmarks, the new version sports another brand new feature, Page Pilot, which is pretty similar (but, unfortunately, still inferior) to the well-known page navigation / zoom-out feature of Nokia's excellent Symbian S60 Series 3 Web browser.

If you long-press the "Down" arrow on your D-pad, then, the view will quickly zoom out entirely to show the entire Web page, with the need for vertical scrolling only on very long pages (like my benchmarking page). An example of such a zoomed-out state are as follows: QVGA and VGA screenshot. There, you can freely move the red selection frame with either the D-pad or with the stylus; after doing this, it'll promptly zoom back to the previous (normal) zoom level.

In most cases, this feature uses a far too zoomed out state, which renders the feature, in general, pretty useless (at least on low-resolution QVGA devices; hope the Access folks come up with a configurable zoom-out percentage), but, at least, it's nice to see the NetFront engineers try to implement one of the killer features of the new Nokia browser.

CSS and AJAX compliance

(See THIS for more info / background on these tests!)

As far as CSS is concerned, as can be seen in this result screenshot, the CSS compliance has only slightly been improved over the previous version. Opera Mobile and Minimo (two excellent alternative Pocket PC browsers) are still way better in this respect.

As far as AJAX is concerned (the new browser is also advertised to have a brand new Ajax engine), the AJAX support has really been improved. NF 3.4 has passed my Test1, Test2, Simple Ajax Address Book - 1 and 2 tests (click for screenshots as usual). It's only the ImageLabeler test that didn't run (it just presents an empty screen). This is very good news! Now, while Minimo and Opera Mobile are still better at this compartment, NetFront is getting closer.

Benchmarks

In these tests, I’ve used my well-known benchmark page (please do read my past articles on how it should be used). I’ve benchmarked both page loading times and memory consumption of the loaded page (NOT NetFront itself!).

As far as page loading times are concerned, they are considerably (about 35%) lower than with version 3.3 and are slightly above the HALF of AKU2+ PIE times (and, therefore, even better than pre-AKU2 PIE's). Impressive!

As far as dynamic memory (RAM) usage is concerned, I’ve benchmarked really unbelievable results with the new version – it even beats Opera Mobile, the, up to now, most memory-friendly full-blown Pocket PC Web browser (note that Opera Mini and Thunderhawk both have even better memory usage but they’re using a simplified page structure) out of water!

All in all, the engine has REALLY been improved, speed and dynamic memory usage-wise! Thumbs up to Access – this is what I call REALLY cool!

That is, Pros

Vastly improved memory usage and considerably decreased page loading times!

Quick reload when you press Back, like in AKU2+ PIE or Opera Mobile (a GREAT feature in a Pocket PC Web browser with an expensive and/or slow connection!)

The general Web compliance has been greatly enhanced (see for example IHT)

AJAX support is getting pretty good (not so good as with Minimo / Opera Mobile though)

The new Visual Bookmarks are pretty cool-looking, albeit a bit slow in use and, therefore, seems to offer limited usability

The same stands for the new Page Pilot functionality.

Cons

Currently, WM5 only – don’t even try to install it on your pre-WM5 device because it won’t work

You may run into some overlapping problems even in unrestricted Normal display mode, necessitating the change to Smart-Fit Rendering (which roughly – but not always, see the Game-Over screenshot! – corresponds to “One column” in the PIE parlance, particularly when the "Simple Browsing" browsing mode is (also) active)

No real plug-ins and the restrictions are pretty severe. The plug-ins / the number of parallel tabs can’t be hacked and, therefore, the browser can’t be “hacked” to become a fully-fledged one, not even for paying customers of 3.3 and it’ll take long-long months if not even a year (as was roughly the case with 3.3) for Access to release the final, commercial, unrestricted version. Note that the lack of the Macromedia / Adobe Flash plug-in also mean I couldn’t test whether the Flash plug-in bug of 3.2 / 3.3 I’ve discovered has been fixed or not

When you change for example the zoom factor, the text size, the browsing and the display mode (all in the View menu), the visual change is considerably slower than with PIE or Opera Mobile because NF still checks whether there is a new version of all the used resources (and reloads them if they've been changed). This behavior, in addition to the (in most cases, little) network bandwidth usage, also makes any of these changes considerably slower. Unfortunately, the cache setting (Network first (only on startup) / Cache first) don't have any effect on this.

Still no hardware button support, including the inability to redefine the WM5 softkeys. A quick note: fortunately, they're better-behaving than those of PIE in full screen mode: when you press a softkey, the submenu will be promptly displayed. With PIE, you need two softkey presses to achieve the same.

Still impossible to hide the scrollbars / tabs in full screen mode

Still pretty bad CSS compliance (albeit a bit better than in 3.3)

Unfortunately, the download dialog is still modal (under WM5), which means you can’t do anything while downloading – this can be a major pain in the back if you, for example, download over a slow (say, GPRS) connection. This is a definite minus compared to almost all the other Pocket PC Web browsers, which do allow for continued Web browsing / navigation while downloading in the background. (VGA screenshot; QVGA screenshot in full screen mode and not in full screen mode) Please see this roundup for more information on all this.

Still has problems with Unicode (for example, with Word punctuation) when using the (default) Western alphabet as can be seen in here; this problem can only be eliminated by after switching to for example Central-European. (Also see this thread on this problem)

Verdict

I certainly welcome the vastly enhanced engine in many respects (except for, unfortunately, the still pretty bad CSS compatibility). Way to go Access!

Give this browser a try particularly if memory usage is a concern (because, for example, you’re accessing VERY big Web pages on a low-end Pocket PC like the 32M RAM (12M usable at most) HP iPAQ rx1950) and the lack of Flash / Java support isn’t a problem.

UPDATE (01/20/2007): AximSite frontpage. It might be worth checking out because there are some additional success / problem reports in there.

Other (also reader) feedback available at http://www.aximsite.com/boards/showthread.php?t=146178 , http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=428534 , http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1091673 , http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1092210 , http://forum.brighthand.com/showthread.php?t=236000 and http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=290504 .