Android Browser Wars (Part 2) 2011

In this part 2 of Browser Wars, I'll be reviewing the Whatevs'. These browsers do not offer a great deal of performance improvements.

Let's take look at Skyfire. Skyfire appears to have a following despite its shortcomings. I have no idea why. Maybe it appears on the Market higher than other browsers.


The first thing you'll realise when you launch the browser is that it requires a plugin to play videos. If memory serves me right it's a feature of Skyfire to compile the videos available on a page and lets you play them just by going through the list. Apparently the feature was made into a value-added feature.


It appears that I still can play youtube on the mobile site, but it'll launch the built-in flash player. No biggie. The biggie is that I can never load the desktop version of youtube without it bouncing me back to the mobile site. I even made damn sure it's loading in desktop mode!! Annoying!!


For facebook junkies, there's a tab at the bottom that has shortcuts to sharing the page you're currently viewing. Yay!!

Other than that it pretty much performs just like the stock browser: ok on full sites, extreme choppiness on PhoneDog.com.

Oh and Skyfire doesn't have a dedicated exit button either! How neat! The worst part is that it's harder to perform the 'close tab and minimise' trick as on the stock browser because there simply is no close tab button for when there's one and only one tab open. Damn!!!


It's only when you decide to hit the back button once more to realise an exit function does exit. But it only appears after you've back-ed all the way to the default page.


As for text selection, there's no long tap and hold feature. You'll have to go into options and tap 'select text'



Then a cursor will appear which is beyond useless at this time of touchscreen interfaces.


You tap on any place on the page and the 2 slider things will appear.

Skyfire deserves a 5/10. It offers what appears to be more features, but the lack of a close tab button for when there's only one tab ticks me off. Oh did I mention I hate the 'download the plugin now!' prompt from time to time? No performance boost keeps me away from skyfire.

Next we have Maxthon Browser.

Upon launching, you will be greeted with 3 pages. Starting with the left most, you see suggested shortcut sites. Swipe to the right you'll see bookmarks. Lastly at the rightmost you see your browsing history.

One thing I noticed about Maxthon browser is that it has this Safari-esque thing that clears the URL field when you tap on the cross. Very handy when you do not want to 'select all -> backspace' to clear the URL.

The annoying thing with Maxthon is that it requires gestures to fully use the browser. Opening new tabs is not possible without gestures. So is moving between tabs. Not something I like doing. Lazy to test how it performs when opening 2 webpages.

Personally don't see myself using this browser as I prefer my browser to be less gimmicky.

Next we look at xScope Browser.

On the surface it has some resemblance to the Chrome browser, specifically the tabs area.

Thing I don't like with it is the label-less icons. Personal thing.

Tabs management.

Exit button.

Again, the browsers in this post do not offer much performance enhancements. So as expected, scrolling and pinch zooming on phonedog.com is choppy at best. Opening Engadget and PhoneDog in separate tabs is doable but will present lagginess.


Last but not least we have Miren Browser. Miren Browser is said to be the browser in the famous MIUI custom ROM.

There's nothing much to Miren Browser. Its performance is on par with the stock browser. It has a clean look though.

Text selection is a bit ambiguous. You'd have to find the 'Select Text' option in the pop-up menu. Then the who raindrop things appear. Thing with it is that the selection is not highlighted, so it's quite difficult to determine what have you selected.

It also has a dedicated exit button.

In Part 3, I'll be talking about the Awesome. They are the ones that offer performance enhancement to varying degrees, but generally perform better than the Whatevs.

Please tell me what you think! See you next time!

Android Browser Wars (Part 1) 2011

Browsers. They are an essential part of the smartphone experience. You primarily use it to browse webpages and frankly you do it quite frequently on a smartphone. Therefore it is crucial to have a pleasant browsing experience.

The beauty of Android is that the user gets to choose which browser to use, most of them free to download on the Market. However there're literally tens of browsers out there. Some of them are awesome, some of them not so.

So let's address the Browser Wars of June 2011.

I'll be dividing the browsers into 3 groups: stock, Whatevs and Awesome.

Since I do not have a spare HTC phone to test out the stock HTC browser, nor A samsung, so I'll only be testing one stock browser which is the Android 2.3 stock browser.

I will take the stock browser as the benchmark.


The stock browser handles mobile sites quite well. Scrolling is smooth on mobile sites.


The stock browser handles full sites quite well. Scrolling and pinch zooming is ok, but becomes unbearable on heavy sites (one example that I love is PhoneDog.com)


As for text selection, it treats itself as an entity of the Android experience, requiring no extra input to select text, just like in messaging.


One thing I won't like about the stock browser is that it doesn't have an exit button to give proper closure. One would have to keep tapping the back button to exit the browser. Or a workaround that I use which is closing the lone tab.

The performance of the stock browser is just ok. It fails to open phonedog.com and engadget.com in separate tabs.

For a benchmark, I will give the stock browser a ceremonial 5 out of 10. I will grade other browsers as whether they are better or worse then the stock browser. The degree of better-ness or worse-ness if dependent on the score. 10 = Awesome, 1 = Kill me.

This concludes part 1 of this address. Stay tuned for Part 2!


Please tell me what you think! See you next time!

Qualitative effects of Overclocking your Android [Browsing and Emulators]

 What is the evidence of your device performing better after overclocking? Normally people compare performance via a benchmark rating, eg Quadrant or SmartBench. However these number don't always translate very well into end results. How is a 500 point difference on Quadrant Standard going to make your phone different?

My investigation on the matter will be based around 2 elements that I find demonstrate the effects very well. It's the browsing experience and emulators.

The video illustrates my investigation.





Please tell me what you think! See you next time!

Text input in Android 2.3 Gingerbread

In Android 2.3, the keyboard was completely revamped. I will detail the Android 2.3 keyboard the best I can in this post.





First, let's take a look at the Froyo keyboard.



And the new Gingerbread keyboard:




Off the bat you can see that the colour scheme is different. The new keyboard has a higher contrast between the keys and the background. The new keys are also shorter in height so as to create more space between keys.

Taking a look at the number keyboard:

And the alternative symbold keyboard:

Android 2.3 also brings a sub-menu feature, where holding down the period button brings up a sub-menu, and you navigate the orange box around to select the symbol, all without lifting the finger:
The comma key holds a submenu to access the keyboard settings directly.

In certain places where the keyboard thinks chatting is of high priority, the return key will change into the emoticon sub-menu key:

Besides, in Android 2.3, cursor navigation has been improved by means of a tab thingy that the user can move around to place the cursor. The user drags the tab around. In the picture below, the cursor is at "brow|n" (The cursor blinks and the screen capture failed to capture it).

There's also an easier way to select text. In messages, you double tap a word to bring up the text selection bracket:

You can of course move the brackets around to select text. In messages you are only allowed to move the bracket in front to the front, and the back bracket to the back. This restriction is lifted when selecting text in other applications.

The text selection bracket is extended to the stock browser (and any other browser that supports it):

To bring it up, tap and hold on a word and it will appear. As mentioned earlier, the "front to front, back to back" restriction is not applied here. The front bracket can be moved to behind the back bracket and vice versa.

To copy the selected text, you just tap on it once:

The Android 2.3 keyboard supports multitouch input. This means that the user can hold down the uppercase key like the 'shift' key in normal keyboards to input uppercase letters. Releasing the uppercase key returns the input to lowercase. This allows the user to input uppercase letters without double tapping the uppercase key:

In this diagram, the uppercase key was held while the 'B' key was tapped.

Taking a look into the settings:


Overall I felt that the Android 2.3 keyboard is a pleasure to use. The spell check in it is the best among all the other keyboards I have tried.

Please tell me what you think! See you next time!

Motorola Xoom Hands On at IOI Mall SenQ

In this video I document my hands on experience of the Motorola Xoom



Made a short video about the text input functionality as well.




Please tell me what you think! See you next time!