Video: Web Browsing on Nokia 808 PureView (default browser & Opera)
Symbian Belle FP1 has come very far, but one major aspect still picked up by reviewers is the Nokia 808 PureView’s default browser.
Symbian fans would almost always recommend you switch over to Opera for a more fluid/less frustrating browsing experience.
by myphonegr
Thanks Jill for the tip!
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Sites That Link to this Post
- Video: Demo web preglednika v 8.2 na Nokiji 808 Pureview | NokiaMob | July 8, 2012
- Nokia 808 PW: test internet con browser stock e Opera | July 9, 2012
- Nokia 808 PureView pone a prueba su navegador y Opera | July 9, 2012
lol so desktop pages are smoother than the mobile pages?
Yeah thats bit awkward isnt it…:p
First the websites he tried opened pretty fine on stock browser too….second opera seems to be working better then stock…at last i think he could have done better comparision…:p
browser v8.3 with flash disabled performs mugh better than opera. And that’s on the n8. Disable java for an extra boost.
Yuck!!!!
Poor symbian
It isn’t symbian, its the Symbian browser.. and the slow RAM/CPU combo
good point.
… but you know, the nokia/ symbian hardware apologists always said that symbian hardware is plenty, it runs fast and it’s snappy with no lag whatsoever, no wonder those low spec’d guys got a bop on their head.
Just need Cortex A8 or above for full Flash.
Opera was smooth.
Kinda shocking – 5 years after Apple demo’d a smooth running safari on iphone and on Nokia’s top line Symbian, its still pants in comparison.
Pitiful.
After seeing so much of appreciated,top rated videos now its turn to see the truth!!
touchscreen!=smooth=FAIL
Agreed. Nokia should have used a better processor.
that just sucks.
well, if you disable flash and javascript the browser is pretty usable (opera and safari doesn´t have flash neither). In fact I prefer this to opera with my N8. But yes, default should be better
That’s how I used the default browser to browse mynokiablog.
It was the only way to use the default browser.
Also, disabling pictures help.
Loads mnb in seconds instead of minutes.
how many seconds – 120?
10-20 maybe?
i dont understand how you guys have such issues with the stock browser oO i havent disabled anything and find it fine load times suck on my data but are good on wifi
Its a pain in the ass to use.
When Belle Refresh will be rolled out for N8? We are in second week of July month, but still there is no news about the release from Nokia.
That was my biggest let down when i went to do a handson of Nokia 808 .. i tried opening My Nokia Blog & the browser just sucked .. just besides Lumia 800 was there & it opened My Nokia Blog just perfectly
I am not sure why…but mynokiablog takes a lot more time to load.
Even on WiFi it takes significantly more time in comparision to other websites.
mynokiablog is even on a pentium4 3GHz extremely slow. Also a E8400 need some time for it.
I’m loving the Bing search on lumia. I’ll just use apps on the 808. No shipping email yet.
What happens when Android Malware goes PANDEMIC by the end of this year as that security company says?
The camera search feature is amazing. Seriously saved me so much time with that app.
sad
I would like to note though , that the PureView 808 is probably the best Nokia phone in terms of signal strength and dropless calling …
better than the e72 ? I have to see it to believe it
Ya, Nokia Browser is quite slow when it comes to blogs and forums. I’ve been using Opera Mini for those. But when I want to download or use site with flash, i used Nokia Browser. Not that I necessarily have to, but just so the damn thing gets some use. For instance, mobile gsmarena site doesn’t fly with Opera Mini.
By the way guys PLEASE TURN OFF AUTOMATIC RELOAD AS IT INCREASES LATENCY IN OPENING SITES .
great tip! Even on my old E72 MNB loads pretty quickly with stock browser. (java disabled, images enabled, flash off)
This phone can decode billions of pixels per second, but it can render a mobile web site. The browser needs to start using those potent GPUs.. otherwise we won’t see much gain with that cpu/ram combo.
*can’t
It’s not the CPU/RAM combo that bogs down the browser, it’s just the shit code that hasn’t changed for an eternity. ARM11 at 1.3GHz is as fast as a Cortex A8 at 850-900MHz. Also, if you guys remember, iPhone 3G with a much slower, approximately 400MHz ARM11, had a smooth operating browser, load times were slow though.
I’ve been quite happy with the browser. I mostly use mobile sites because using full sites on a 4 inch screen is annoying, no matter how fast the browser is.
The browser in Gravity is a lot faster than the stock browser, so I don’t know what is the deal with the stock browser.
The browser in Gravity is the stock browser. But only the “portable” part of it, that is: the page renderer, javascript, images, flash, cookies and that’s basically it. Other parts are not included, such as tab management, auto refresh, enhanced settings etc.
And in 2009 we had Maemo 5 and MicroB.
Think about it. Think.
ya.. well, we’ve been over this several times before. Nokia fuked up. And I guess no one on the Symbian team thought that they should work on porting newer hardware to the platform, and working on browser. They had too many things to fix, and not enough time I guess. I still think, that given enough time and effort, Symbian can be one of the best platforms out there.. too bad we live in a marketing driven society.
Sorry but what’s your point? It’s Elop who had cancelled Meego, which was the successor of Maemo/N900. No I think Nokia was right in pursuing the Meego strategy with Intel because Meego was supposed to be a universal OS for all sorts of embedded devices and also would have more partnership across the industry — So Ecosystem? (to quote elop). That it was late.. yeah things happen. But when it was to take off, Elop killed it.
As for Symbian, remember S^4 ? Like WP8, it was supposed to have addressed the problems.. You, Janne, are so adept at moving goal post to WP8 but gives no respite to symbian or meego.
Seriously? Elop again?
urgh.
Just to remind you, wp7.5 had many many problems.
But a great browsing experience was never a problem.
And for Symbian, remember at Nokia world 2010, we were promised a world leading browser in a Symbian device? And world class my ass.
You are right. Don’t want to talk about Elop. I’m just responding to people like Janne repeating ad nauseum:
“Look, Nokia should have gone Maemo in 2009. All OPK’s fault. Look at the shitty Symbian.. Look how great Elop is, having torpedoed it and all.”
But I do agree with you guys: Nokia deserves Elop.
yesir:
I sincerely doubt S^4 would have fixed the browser enough, considering Nokia’s scatter-brained efforts on this front. Not even the N9 has a browser as good as MicroB, which I still consider the best mobile browser on any platform. Running on 680 MHz and 256 MB of RAM. Half of what the 808 has, very roughly speaking.
My point has got nothing to do with Elop, although everything here these days seems to turn to Elop. No, I am an old Maemo fan lamenting Nokia’s indecision and/or inability to put its full weight behind it years ago. All globally distributed overlapping software efforts with manning twice, three times or more than the size of Apple and others, could not come up with better… Because it got wasted on internal turf wars and eternally trying to fix Symbian.
Who made MicroB ?
Good question. MicroB is based on Mozilla, I always assumed the Maemo team did the rest?
But I didn’t mean to derail this topic. MicroB is ancient history, unfortunately. So I’ll let it be.
Checkout snowshoe, coming along VERY nicely nowadays…
A bit more spit and polish & we have unquestionably a true MicroB successor.
(none of the frustrating closed limitations of the stock browser)
Sadly resources have dropped lots lately, so it may take quite a bit longer than originally planned.
It’s official now here. Elop has some fans!!!
Where is MicroB in N9? Please show it to me. Thanks.
Well there’s an opportunity for someone…….
I have UC browser as well. Faster than Opera.
Well I use Opera Mini.. its the fastest to use, but some sites do render better on the stock browser..So for me 90% Opera and 10% Web
I would say most render way better on the stock or Opera Mobile.. at least in my case.
Like mentioned before, if you switch off auto reloading (thanks nabkawe!), java script, and flash… it works much better. Overall the stock is really enough if you want to look up something quickly, or.. just read the news.. but it isn’t for long browsing sessions, which is kind of silly to do on a 4 inch screen anyway, but I understand the need.
Normally wifi is faster than 3G connection, it depends of the operator network and yes Symbian´s browser works fine for me through wifi. Galaxy Note has a faster browser and it is also faster with Opera, I think it is because web browsing requires more CPU power and RAM size.
While I don’t agree with lord us thickness and camera issues with 808, I agree that to use a Symbian smartphone from any other platform would mean having to sacrifice alot of features that others might consider as the cornerstone as a modern smartphone.
‘a lot of features’ means specifically what?
1. Browser sux
2. ?
Keyboard?
unintrsuive app installations?
a customizable notification pane?
360 rotations?
Screen resolution related issues?
apps that are free on other platforms requires money on Symbian?
Apps that just don’t exist in any form on Symbian?
this is based on my experience with my n8 and videos of 808 that I have seen on the web.
I agree with the app installations (a pain), the customizable notification pane and the screen resolution (Symbian sacrifices flexibility to elegance, since it is perfectly capable of running in multiple resolutions, as the E6 shows, but the workspace would look messy just like Android ones). I have no issues with the Symbian keyboard, while I find the missing arrow keys on the Android keyboard frustrating. I do not like 360 rotations; IMO it is not a bug, it is wanted: you can choose between landscape and portrait, that’s all; don’t let the system be intrusive and decide that you don’t want the display upside down.
On the other hand, on stock Android ICS I cannot install applications on more than one removable storage (this is an issue for Chinese phones that see internal memory as removable); I cannot connect to ad-hoc networks (so I cannot tether to Nokias using Joikuspot); and yesterday, after taking off the battery, the system stopped showing my SD card and expansion memory, since the two /mnt/sdcard entries had not been deleted and when trying to create the two new entries for mounting the devices it failed. I solved this because I have some *nix knowledge and a rooted phone, but this shows clearly that some issues (such as removable media) are managed in an ancient way, typical of a system that extends its roots back to the 1960s. While Symbian problems are more or less resolvable, such Android (or Linux) issues are there to stay for the foreseeable future.
I have no issues with the keyboard. I use T9 most of the time anyways.
I agree with the app installations. (un)installing apps is a real drag on Symbian.
I like that my screen doesn’t rotate 360 degrees. In bed I don’t have to lock screen rotation. I just lie on my right side et voilá.
Apps are a personal preference as well. I am not an app kind of person. I do not play games and my social activities are restricted to Twitter. (Symbian has the best Twitter app available). I have all the functionality I personally need. Services I use that do not have an app, have fully functional mobile websites, so nothing missing there. However, if you are into apps, I can understand why that might hold you back.
I only use the stock browser and the browser in Gravity. I have Opera Mobile/Mini and MiniBrowserMobile installed, but never use them.
So don’t use it! Don’t need point to the shit and keep yelling SHIIT!
Point taken, jesus christ!
What did I say about those subjects?
I wrote the device is 17.95mm thick because it is.
I also wrote the 808 just can’t make compacts obsolete. Yeah, some features are missing but it’s a great camera.
The fanboys seem to think it can’t be a nice product if it’s 17.95mm thick and it can’t make compacts obsolete. I don’t understand why.
Honestly I can’t remember. If it was not you, its cool. But impretyu sure I got the camera and thickness part right.
Honestly I can’t remember. If it was not you, its cool. But impretyu sure I got the camera and thickness part right.
Just to clarify: Nokia 808 PureView is 13.9 mm thick for the most part, with a 17.95 mm thick camera bump which takes about one quarter of the device.
Yeah, that makes it 17.95mm thick.
indeed i really dont remember using the inbuilt browser. It really sucks and that too on a data connection its hefty costly. Opera loads faster and is slick to use. There needs a lot of fixing to the symbian browser. Even thoug i love symbian for whatever it has offered.
Opera on the N8 generation still lags with a few tabs open and images showing. All Nokia needed to do was to put a faster CPU and more RAM to keep the platform fresh and viable for a while longer, but they didn’t.
Slapping on an ARM11 at 680 MHz and 256 MB RAM is a joke, sorry.
The N8 generation hardware was chosen back in 2008, when 680 MHz seemed pretty good. Nokia’s long product lead times have been a major problem for Symbian since the same year. Symbian’s poor portability was part of the problem, the other part was just poor execution.
It’s hard to remain a Symbian fan when both default Webkit browser and Opera Mobile are slow even on the 808. Slapping on old and insufficient hardware on a platform just because it’s “efficient” is a quick way of making it obsolete.
Just hop over to Android and you can use the surprisingly decent default browser, Dolphin, Opera Mobile, Firefox Beta and Aurora… all with their own feature sets and all which run quite fast even on last year’s top-of-the-range hardware.
To get a good user experience, you need a good match between hardware and software. Apple understood this and optimized the hell out of Safari on the first iPhone even if it didn’t run the fastest CPU… Nokia still don’t get it.
They still don’t bloody get it and now time has run out for fixing anything on Symbian. Gets me riled up every time
Actually, I think Nokia does NOW get it. That’s one reason it is getting rid of Symbian. The browser is not slow because of the hardware, it is slow because it is… well, part of Nokia’s Symbian. And fixing it just isn’t realistic anymore. They tried for years. (I think it was jiipee who had some insight into one of Nokia’s Symbian browser debacles here some days ago.)
The browsing experience on Lumia is great. Sadly it was already great on the N900 in 2009, but Nokia didn’t get it then.
The Symbian browser development was really a huge blunder, albeit I don’t think it can be attributed to Symbian as an OS. Web browser is after all still just an application. Symbian had other problems.
I wonder why they tried to fix the Symbian browser instead of just rewriting it completely. Writing a web browser around a preexisting OSS layout engine (either WebKit or Gecko) is not THAT difficult. But Nokia’s Symbian related software development did have big management issues and lack of strategic vision. Nokia was much too conservative and generally tried to fix problems them instead of starting from scratch. That applied not only to the Browser but the Symbian OS as well.
Fair message, Marc.
While I’d probably speculate attributing somewhat more of the problems to Symbian (it being a platform harder to code for than many others), your view resonates well with me. You have probably much of the problem covered there. Failing to provide a good browser for Symbian (considering these web-enabled times) is probably one of the major failures at Nokia considering Symbian. It is just so crucial nowadays.
Frankly, had I been Nokia, I would have just dumped to homegrown efforts and licensed a skinned version of Opera. Or just Opera as is and renamed in Web on the menu.
Not that Opera fixes all, but it would have overall given Symbian^3 a better name than the browser it had. It would have made the default browser at least passable.
Didn’t Nokia actually use Opera at some point in Symbian’s history? I remember getting it in some devices…
Opera 6.x was bundled in some S60 2.x devices, for example the N70. Opera Mini of course was until recently bundled with many Series 40 devices before the Nokia Browser for S40 was launched. Which by the way shows that Nokia can do a pretty decent browser. In some ways it’s even better than Opera Mini, although it still lacks some important features like tabbed browsing.
But I agree, when it started to be obvious that attempts to fix the Symbian browser were not going anywhere very fast, Nokia should have just licensed Opera Mobile for all Symbian phones. It would not have been cheap, but at that point Nokia still had the money to spent. Back in 2009-2010 they could have bought Opera Software if they really wanted.
The Opera wasn’t too much slower than my iPhone 4S.(its in fact usable even in those S60v5 phones that ruined Symbians reputation)
Yeah, the 17.95mm thick 808 is a nice camera with substandard smartphone features. Modern smartphones have a great great default browser.
Whos to say whats standard…unless it means what is most popular. “Standard” smart phones lack FM-Radio and receiver, might be, that some users would love to have that feature, but they don’t know about it, because of “standard” making hegemony.
Opera is quite smooth, so there really is an “app for that”, but theres not app for FM-Radio or Pureview. And theres not many short comings in 808, on the contrary, it has something to offer, that others cannot give you. It is different product, and well balanced too.
The certain mobile forum is based in http://jquerymobile.com/.The selection of jquerymobile for the mobile version is made because this platform supports all the modern OS versions.And unfortunately,like it or not,Nokia stopped supporting symbian.On the other hand,Opera manages to give overall better performance and Nokia can not?It does not make any sense,even for a <> OS.
While the slowness of the Symbian stock browser can be annoying, I have always wondered why people bitch about it so much more than about the slowness of the Microsoft Windows (desktop versions) stock browser. IE9 is more or less okay, but before it became available the previous IE version were slow as hell compared to Chrome and Forefox, and even today IE9 is again starting to look slowish compared to latest versions of Chrome and FF. While that is not an excuse for Nokia, this is a case where Nokia has actually reserved worse press than Microsoft (an achievement in itself, if not fair).
One thing may be that while IE was slower than the competition, it was still acceptable fast on most computers. Symbian’s browser on the other hand hasn’t really ever provided a “fast enough” experience, it has always been relatively slow – although originally at a time when all mobile browsers were bad and slow it was actually quite OK. It just didn’t evolve with the times.
Probably most people are more impatient than I, but even Web 7.2 was in the majority of cases “fast enough” for me. I hate most BS media heavy pages even on the desktop, though, so perhaps my surfing habits favor lightweight sites more than the average. I do use mobile pages if they exist simply because I don’t like scrolling around in both directions, no matter how smooth it is.
Android here I come… fast!!