Windows Phone Thoughts: Seize the Day With the Samsung Intrepid from Sprint

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Friday, February 12, 2010

Seize the Day With the Samsung Intrepid from Sprint

Posted by Doug Raeburn in "Samsung Windows Phones" @ 07:30 AM

Web Browsing

WM 6.5 includes the latest touch enabled version of Internet Explorer Mobile. In addition to the interface updates, it also includes much more contemporary underpinnings than did previous versions.

Figure 23: Here's how the latest Internet Explorer Mobile looks on a larger touch screen. It looks similar on the Intrepid, just in landscape orientation.

So, how well did the updates go? For starters, it looks pretty good. (Unfortunately, I can't include any screen shots because this phone and the software I use for my screenshots are at odds, so the data connection won't work with the software installed.) It uses a very nice semi-transparent toolbar that's less obtrusive than those of its competitors. It shrinks down to a single icon on the right of the screen when it's retrieving and displaying a page, and a tap on that icon expands to a full set of five icons. Taking a page from Opera Mobile, you scroll around a small version of a page and double-tap when you want to expand something. It does a good job of filling the screen with the content on which you've tapped, in particular filling the page with text and wrapping it to fit.

My biggest issue with this version of IE Mobile is slow rendering. I don't know if it was the phone, the software or the network, but it seemed like I was waiting an eternity even with a 3G connection. And a partially displayed screen was mostly unresponsive, so you couldn't reliably specify that you wanted to zoom in on a particular part of the page until the page was almost fully rendered.

Figure 24: SkyFire on a larger screen. Again, the Intrepid looks similar in landscape.

To try to narrow down the culprit, I installed SkyFire, the browser that I use on my Samsung Jack. It supports just about every flavor of Windows Mobile, including the Intrepid. I fired it up and BAM... it was like the Intrepid got a huge dose of adrenaline. Pages rendered quickly and I could navigate easily on partially rendered pages. When I tapped on a section of the page on which I wanted to zoom in on a partially rendered page, SkyFire would interrupt the initial page load and start to load the zoomed section. SkyFire is a proxy browser, which speeds things up by communicating with servers that retrieve, pre-render and compress the content that you've requested before it's sent to your phone. The difference is very noticeable when compared to the standard approach of IE Mobile, which retrieves content directly from the site that contains it.

The touch screen is very responsive with both browsers, feeling almost like a capacitive screen rather than a resistive screen. Both browsers work nicely with the directional pad as well, if that's your preference. So it seems that the Intrepid is a great phone for browsing, as long as you have the right browser. Both SkyFire and Opera Mobile (another product using proxy servers for greater speed) work well, both are faster than IE Mobile by a considerable degree and both are free. So if you get an Intrepid, either of these alternative browsers should be one of your first additions.


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