thought i would get some feedback on my new n810. g/f surprised me with a n810 for my b-day on the 24th. she bought from buy.com (14 day return policy)... on the 12th.. so basically i have 1 day to decide if i want to keep this or not. she know's i read certain internet sites pretty much everynight on my laptop and sometimes it's just too big and bothersome. i also read the same sites on my t-mo dash smartphone and it actually loads pretty fast even without turning on the wi-fi.. so.. here are my thoughts.
1) after loading diablo and jumping on some sites i usually read, the device seems really really slow. great connectiong to my Fios router so that doesnt seem to be a problem. i loaded a website i read (t-nation.com) on my cell and the n810 at the same time and the cell was much faster loading the website with just Edge. couldn't believe it. also.. when Zooming to a level i could actually read, it doesnt make the sentences inside a thread short enough to not have to pan left and right.. if i use "fit to width" i still have to zoom to about 200% to see the text. is this normal?
2), when zooming, the avitar's get zoomed also so i can only see a little section of the avitar picture (normally this wouldnt matter but when i read certain threads, i only want to read posts by certain people and need to see their avitar to identify the post.
3) what takes me 5 minutes to read on my laptop, and 7-10 minutes to read on my smartphone i couldnt read in 30 minutes on the n810. is the learning curve that great?
4) seems like there's alot of "root" work that must be done to the n810 to get it to work right. example to get it to connect to my windows smartphone as a modem.. is it like this always with this device? dont get me wrong, i hack and put new rom's on my phones all the time but would like to cut back on that stuff (as it's time consuming) and just read/study/research etc. shoot. on pubmed.com i couldnt even do a proper search of a subject in 20 mnutes.

well. those are my concerns after only getting to know this device for a couple of hours but basically being frustrated at it. Am i alone in this feeling. maybe it's just that im used to I.E. on my laptop and Opera on my smartphone.. also, i have owend 3 different windows pda's and 3 differnt smartphones (and a palm).. so i have a fair amount of general device knowledge..

any thougts or suggestions would be cool since i have only one more day to return to buy.com or im sure i could always sell on the bay or here if needed. i was really looking forward to dumping the laptop for my late night reading. hopefully i can get some suggestions or feedback and get talked into keeping it.

thanks for reading.

Bill.

I'm not going to tell you what you should do, but if you're only using it for web browsing and you're judging it on the issues you listed, maybe it's not for you. Is your smartphone viewing full size web pages or mobile web pages? Mobile web pages are optimized for small cell phone displays and will load faster.

For me - I have an N800 and I love it. Linux is my hobby and the N800 is a wonderful toy for that hobby. I've taken it on trips instead of a laptop. It does anything a laptop does (yea it's slower - it has a slower processor): email, web, rss, youtube, internet radio and internet xm radio, plays music and movie files, displays photos, makes Skype phone calls and Gizmo video phone calls, edits and prints spreadsheets and documents, and much much more. It's always on standby - I never turn it off, so it's ready if I want to do a quick lookup on the internet.

Some of this takes some work to get running, but that's what makes it so much fun!!

Search for increasing font size in microb in this forum.

And yes the learning curve is a little high.... but i assure you it is well worth it.

In a few days you will be inseparable with your n810. Of course your girlfriend will not be happy for giving that gift.

Believe me .... all the good things in life need a little patience.

Well... the browser's not anywhere near that bad, in my experience. It's not as fast as on a desktop, to be sure, but nowhere near as bad as it sounds. Most complaints of the browser being really atrocious turn out to be due to having "Fit to Width" turned on -- the implementation of this option's really not all that great. I've had occasion to use it a couple times on very lightweight sites and gotten good results, but mainly, it just makes pages ugly and horrifically slow. But I guess, from what you said, you had that on some of the time, and off some of the time, so I'm sure you saw the difference due to that.

I'm not familiar with the Dash's web browser, but it may be doing a lot more magic to fit the page neatly on a small screen, or even using a mobile version of the site; the N800's browser runs a config very similar to a desktop, intended to give desktop-like results, only smaller. You could try mobilizing proxies, but these do mangle pages in the process... (I haven't used any of them.) More stuff here, but I am only using Brontide's CSS, and flashblock.

You're best off going to full screen, leaving it at 80-120% zoom (I seldom use 120%, but some do; on a lot of sites, that can fit the main text column with no lateral scrolling, and get slightly bigger fonts.), and using "optical zoom" (move the tablet closer ) for any further magnification.

If you do need bigger fonts, but not zooming, that's possible either by changing the minimum font size (documented in the wiki) or another way (which IMHO is better): there's a global scale factor hiding somewhere to scale the reported 96 dpi before converting point sizes to pixels. Of course, I don't remember it, and am not sure where I saw it...

wow, thanks guys for the great responses. Benson, I was using Fit to width mainly because when reading forums like this one if i had it zoomed to anything less than 120% its basically unreadable.. the text is way too small. then zooming to 150% or above the text is readable but i would have to scroll way right, kinda defeting the purpose of easy web browsing. The dash whether im using mobile I.E. or Opera is definetly doing some "magic" but it does it well.. i just wanted to same thing with a bigger screen to keep the scrolling / adjusting down and the reading time up. I will try the bigger font idea as the zoomnig and fit to width do screw up the screen a bunch..
maybe it's the web site.. if you can, navigate to T-nation.com and go to forums.. tell me you can read the threads easily and then if you can tell me what settings you used.. that web site give me alot of enjoyment (it's a bodybuilding/nutrition) website, but is not pda/smartphone friendly.

Possessedskier, im not sure if the smartphone is viewing a mobile version of the full web page but every link, picture, etc is there.. i just wanted to scroll less and read info more.. that's why i thought the bigger screen of the n810 would be perfect.. Opera mobile is a really good web browser though.. i dont need to do too much adjusting to get it to look right.. certainly not as much as with the n810. but i've only used it a few hours now.. as far as email, spreadsheets, word, and skype, i can do all that with my smartphone. windows mobile 6.1 is really an upgrade from 5.0 and 6.0. i do emails daily on it and can pound them out pretty quickly.. mainly i wanted the n810 for nightime web browning/reading. thanks for the posts!

One of the things im disappointed with is the 14 day (from the time they shipped the product) return policy of buy.com. i won't buy from them again (i have in the past) because on an idem such as this, it's not enought time to eval. granted my g/f bought this on the 12th and i only got it yesturday (and finally used it last night).. just not enough time to really get into it.. but i have to say writing linux code is not fun to me.. just don't have the time for it.. or maybe i should say patience..

i will try all your suggestions as time permits today.. im sure i could always sell the n810 here on this forum if needed. what are they going for now (with less than 3-4 hours on it?).. prices seem to be dropping but buy.com gets a 15% restocking fee anyway..

any other suggestions are much apprecitated.

Bill.

Probably the web browser on the mobile handset is going to a proxy that is adapting the page for your browser.
There's no flash, no javascript (probably) and pictures are resized and so on..

The tablet is loading a full desktop version of the webpage.
This, to me, explains it.

You have to pay something to get the full Internet on your hands.
The N800 ad used to say "Take the Internet with you".

Checking the site now...

Well, the site's main page does take quite some time to load. If your interest lies mostly in the forums, you could bookmark that as your entry point to avoid some slowness. With my N800, navigation within the fora isn't snappy, but I'd consider it acceptable. Mind you, my standards may not match your own.

With my standard web browsing setup--zoom at 100%, "Fit width to view" off, and the browser not full-screened--I can scroll horizontally slightly to fit the message text plus all but the left 10% or so of the avatars in the screen's width. If I full-screen the browser, then the entire content column fits, but I hates full-screen. Either way, finger-drag scrolling works well.

In the end, what matters is whether the device fulfills your needs and expectations though.

My present configuration: Stock Diablo MicroB + FlashBlock, no "Fit to Width", and 100% zoom unless otherwise specified (EDIT: And full-screen, too).

OK, takes 33 seconds to completely load the whole front page here. This site seems to be designed for 1024x768, so it just almost fits on-screen at 80% zoom, but not quite. And it's big and image laden, so drag scrolling's not exactly snappy. But it works.

Hit the forums link at the top, and it loads in <20 seconds. Individual thread loads completely in ~15 seconds. (And scroll nicely.) At 100% zoom, the entire thread (text + avatar/etc.) fits in the browser width. For me, the text is quite readable...

At 120%, you do lose the avatars (unless you scroll sideways, too) but can handily keep the text on-screen. (Font is perhaps somewhat easier to read, but not much.)

At 150%, you have to align things very carefully, but you can read down the column of text with no horiz scrolling; now, though, the finicky alignment is making it hard to dart over to the left for avatars, so it's rather unusable. The text is getting huge now, but for me, it's no easier to read than at 120%.

Just for kicks, I threw together some css to "fix" it. It's not optimal, and has rather ugly results, but it helps...
You'll need to put it in .mozilla/microb/chrome/userContent.css. (More details...) It right-aligns the avatars (and user info with them) and makes the font 150% in the text. Now zoom up to 120% works with a good chunk of the avatars (and all but lengthy usernames) on screen, or 100% is comfy reading. There's a screenshot of this at 100%...

Finally, I tried applying "Fit Width to View"; it now takes 15s to load the thread page, and then 7s to reflow everything, leaving the actual posts down below all the ads... Not good. Zooming, of course, takes 7s each time, blows the avatars way up, and drops them after the corresponding posts. But no major page rendering breakage occurs up to 300% zoom, for me, so I can still read just as easily (after the initial wait) as before... (Are you running Diablo, i.e. did you flash the device since you got it? They may have enhanced this there; it doesn't seem near as bad as I had remembered from previous versions... As I said, I almost never use FitWidth, as it tends to break most anything but plain text. OTOH, it can be handy for reading online books...)

thanks for the reply.. im not sure about flash but there is javascript. it's free with mobile i.e. and opera browser does cost about 20 bucks for the full mobile version. it's nice though (as nice as can be on a smartphone screen that is)..

yes, i will bookmark the specific threads as some of them get very long and i read them daily to keep up with info. thanks.

wow, those settings are way different than on my n810. at 100% the letters are not even legible.. and i have 20/15 vision (at least in one eye, lol).. the left and right scrolling alone is a pain in the behind only cause i read a line every what 3-4 seconds and to constantly adjust let to right doesnt make for easy or quick reading.

the finger dragging thing seems slow too. not like the iphones i've used (and hated!)..

thanks for the replay, much appreciated.
Bill