High Speed Browsing on the Treo and MyTreo.Net

The web browser that comes with my phone, the Treo 600, is not a bad browser at all, at least compared to other alternatives.  Many phones simply have a “WAP” browser, which can only display text, and not much of it at that.  You cannot go to a regular web page with such a browser, the webmaster has to intentionally create a WAP version of the site.  Even with my T-Mobile Sidekick, a device made for surfing the web among other things, one can’t get to a lot of sites because the browser won't support JavaScript, Java Applets, or other such browser technologies.  So when I got my Treo 600 I was delighted that Blazer, the browser that comes with the phone, was able to get to most sites and display them properly.

Being a web developer I’ve had the blessing of being used to higher-speed internet for a good 5 years now, maybe a little more.  So using a mobile phone, especially one that uses the now aging standard of GPRS for its data communications, feels like going back in time.  The fact is that GPRS only communicates at modem speeds.  Thankfully, many phone browser solutions out there use what are known as “proxy servers” which serve as an intermediary between your phone and the website you want to view:

1. Your phone sends the proxy server a request to see a web page at GPRS (slow) speed
2. The proxy server, which is connected to the internet via a very fast connection, then retrieves the web page in an instant.
3. The proxy server then parses through the web page code looking for ways to make it smaller in size.  So, for example, it takes images and shrinks them, and takes certain things your phone’s browser can’t display anyway, and gets rid of them.  So a page that might originally be 100K in size shrinks to 10K or less.
4. The Proxy server finally sends the shrunken page back to your phone at GPRS speed.

So, in this way, the effective retrieval speeds for web pages are a lot faster than what a modem would offer, although it still can often feel a lot more sluggish than my T3 at work, or even a home DSL or a cable modem connection.

MyTreo.Net is one of the sites out there that I go to from time to time to talk about the Treo and to see what the newest hot programs are.  They are unique, I think, in forging relationships with many developers so that the developers can put out their unfinished product to a select group of users and can then get feedback within the MyTreo message boards.  This is how the new Chatter Email app has been handled.

In the same way, a Japanese company called Mobirus which has had an alternate web browser out for a while called Xiino, has been using a similar relationship to get a new version of their browser out in a condition that will suit Treo 600 users.  I’ve tried their beta version of this browser out just a little and I can say that it is much faster than Blazer.  It renders pages a little differently, opting to shrink graphics down so much that the page looks very similar to what it would look like on a regular screen.  The problem is that because the Treo’s screen is so small, these images become tiny.  While this isn’t a problem with some pages, many pages use images as navigational buttons.  If they have text on them they become illegible and they are also hard to select.  I also had a problem with some images just not coming up.  Nevertheless, this was just released to the community and it looks like Mobirus is very active in attacking any and all issues that people are having, so I suspect a much more polished product will be available fairly soon.

I do sometimes feel like all this work will be made irrelevant within a fairly short period of time – a year or three? – since technology is such that there’s lots of leapfrogging going on.  It could just be a lot sooner than we think that there’s ubiquitous ( and I mean really ubiquitous) high-speed wireless access in addition to devices that use flexible polymer screens that can be rolled up or folded into one’s pocket, but when unfolded can be as big as a standard monitor.  I guess at least until then it will make a lot of people’s experience a lot better, it just seems sad that all this work will be made irrelevant one day.  But I guess that’s true of a lot of things in technology and you can’t let this become a barrier to providing interim solutions.  After all, something in how Mobirus gets their browser to work so quickly may yet be useful in some other application that we simply can’t predict right now.  Well, maybe Mobirus can.

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