Its 6:33 AM now & I was about to go to bed before mom offered to make me some tea so I decided to pick up bro’s laptop & was checking out J2ME design patterns when I saw Opera Mini 4 Beta release news on Airlan San Juan’s Blog. I decided to give it a shot before I hit the sack!

The beta version is smaller in size than the 3.1 version – but packs a whole lot of cool new features!!!

The Beta version now has mouse support & panning/zoom support – something very similar to Microsoft’s DeepFish project & somewhat like the Series 60 Browser. The Beta still uses similar UI as used by the 3.1 version. Browsing was undoubtedly better with the Beta version as it rendered the pages (almost) exactly as they would appear on a PC browser and the ability to navigate to anywhere on the page using a mouse pointer was fantastic!

However, when the page loads – the text gets reduced to unreadable size. So if a web page is new to the user,  this method of pan & zoom is of little use because sometimes its difficult to guess where that interesting piece of information lies… The pan/zoom feature, btw – works even while the page is still loading.

The bugs – browser UI is very unresponsive. I had to wait for almost 2 seconds each time for the joystick click to actually fire the event. Uploading files is still not supported (not a bug, but a future feature maybe). And I still cannot set Google as my search engine at the home page screen – Moreover, AJAX is not fully supported – I tried replying to a scrap on Orkut & the event required a full page reload.

So, here are some screenshots directly from my Potato (E61).

Using Orkut – testing AJAX

Pan…

… & Zoom feature

A mouse makes life so simple!

Default search engine is still Yahoo & I cant change it

Verdict – Nokia Series 60 browser now has a serious competitor! But I wont be switching to Opera Mini completely till it will support file uploads…

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Yesterday I was out on the streets, paying my mobile phone bills when I decided to check for E61i again & this time, the effort was worth it! It was right there, in the showcase, shining in its metalic’ish case! The deal is worth 18k – not much, considering I bought my E61 for 19k

So now, I have plans to retire my Potato (my E61) – either within the family – Sameer is not into such big phones & E61 is bit too daunting on technology for Pops & Mom hehehe OR the next obvious place, the second hand market.

My phone is with original Nokia bill, excellently kept (it was my baby!), comes with the packaged 64 mb MiniSD card. The phone’s screen is scratchless, has a 400 bucks scratchguard screen on it. I have everything that came with the box pack – original CD’s, manuals, hands free, everything!

I’m looking for a buyer – a passionate Nokia user who wants an upgrade to E61. I’m looking for a price range of about 9.5k. If you think you are interested, buzz me at “maku[@]makuchaku[.]info“. I’m willing to negotiate. You’ll have an E61 – almost box packed!

The phone was bought on 11th July 2006.

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I spent few minutes on understanding the problem mentioned here
The bug is filed here

This was my first attempt at the bug…

run python, run the interacive shell
import appuifw as a
import series60_console as s
a.app.body = s.Console()
s.app.body.clear()

Then it struck me, why not add this functionality in the menu? Why type all this (or even s.app.body.clear()) when i need to clear the screen… when I can do it fromt he menu itself.

Result… this patch

PyS60 now showing the option to clear screen.

How to use the new console?
A) Copy the interactive_console.py file from c:\resources to c:\python. This needs to be done because files inside c:\resources are read-only… some symbian 3rd edition restriction crap! Refer to release notes & readme for more on this.
B) Either use the patch to patch interactive_console.py or make the changes yourself. Copy of the edited file is here
C) Run python interpreter on your phone, select run script & run the script you just edited/created in step (B)

Text Editors you can use – myeditor_mod (i used this one), more at isiam.blogspot.com and maybe EasyEdit (Not tried it on E61)

Please file your comments/etc in the bug report.
Note – This is my personal work & I take no responsibility of whatever it might break. PyS60 or Nokia cannot be held responsible for after-effects of this patch.

Happy hacking!

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Looks like Series 60 browser is pretty scared of the “Acid2″…

However i’m happy with the results… Atleast it went on to take the plunge, Opera mini got scared to death when it saw just the test page, forget taking the test. The test link in Opera was not clickable.

Give your browser the Acid2 test & see how it responds! (go directly to take the test)

BTW, here is the output which is treated as the reference.

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What I started as an experiment to know what all formats does my new Series 60 Browser (on Nokia E61) supports, turned out to be a shocking revel eation!

The Series 60 Browser sends across your phone number in the browser user-agent string, while none of the other browsers I tested did this (Services in Nokia handset & Opera Mini)

You can see my phone number there… (smudged!)

This is a screenshot from Opera Mini

I wonder what that IP is… probably something related to Opera mini’s server side processing?

…

Another interesting thing that came up during this is that Nokia’s inbuilt browser (the long-press-0 thing) is picking up things from Opera Mini.
1) It now supports small screen & normal screen rendering
2) Moving joystick left/right scrolls the screen
3) It too does preprocessing of the html page

BTW, is it java based?

Test your browser yourself at http://www.ericgiguere.com/tools/http-header-viewer.html
Here is a snipurl version http://snipurl.com/p1nz if you want to open from your mobie’s browser & dont like that typing

So next time you plan to flame/spam someone using your series 60 browser, he might *call* you back to take revenge!
hahahaha

I wonder if this was designed to be such… or is an un-noticed anomaly!
I definitely do not expect my browser to send out my number!

[update]
The URL revealed in x-wap-profile key is very interesting…
http://nds1.nds.nokia.com/uaprof/NE61-1r100.xml
…atleast it lists all the formats i wanted to know in the first place!

[/update]

[update-2]
http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?p=223065
[/update-2]

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So what is this *Curry* now? Thats the name of my 1 Gig memory card
So from now on, whatever comes off my MMC, would be tagged with “Potato Curry”.

Btw, I wanted to make this post, not for “Potato curry” but for this

4 things about this pic…
1) It was posted to flickr from my Potato
2) Gmail’s SMTP server was behind this push
3) The new series 60 browser is good enough to display menus from yahoo mail…
4) …but not good enough to enable file upload. I was not able to upload file. The file upload was not even working from flickr’s upload. Though I was happy to see that it now understood the file-upload box.

To setup Gmail on your mobile, have a look at this – Part 1 and Part 2. This comment in part 1 is also helpfull. However this FAQ from Google will solve all your doubts.

Good luck!

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