microsoft web sites are demanding

The web's usable, but it's not fun. Some sites are really problems.

The opening page on Amazon.com takes infinity to open, or crashes my browser. Lots of sites have a lot of components to load, and you can watch the count go up to 300, often, a few at a time! I think, but am not sure, that bad javascript causes a hang of 30 seconds or so, with no messages or anything.

On the other hand, my own business websites, designed by my wife, who's fanatical about download sizes, errors, and compatibility, open almost instantly and flawlessly, so I'm guessing that the problems with some sites are their bad or bloated design, not really the 810's fault, unless it really does handle errors poorly, which I'm not sure of. If you do error checks on commercial websites, you'll find many of them are design horrors.

Msnbc.com renders painfully slow but once the page you want to view is loaded, it runs good. A lot of text and images bogs it down on the main page. Individual articles are quicker. That flash/java/whatever header and footer they use seems really sluggish and hard to use to me.

Live.com content works really nicely I actualy use this a lot. It's one of my fav sites to use on the Nokia N810. Skydrive is really nice.

Not sure what netvibes is, I went to netvibes.com. It loaded slow but was useable afterwards. Only a slight slugishness navigating and moving the page arround; theres a lot of widgets.

Espn redirected me to espn.go.com. It started to load and then all of a suddon there was like 2 or 3 popups or pupunders? My first popup on the Nokia eek. Page was slow navigating and slow load time; lots of big pictures.

Newsgator site loaded quickly and was smooth to navigate, the flash was a bit choppy on the main page there. I don't have an account to the online rss reader. Theres a built in rss thing on the n810 btw...

Zoho writer works...not very impressed tho. I went to click new and I guess I hit import and the pop up came ever so slowly I thought it was going to lock up at first. It's difficult for me to use because of small buttons, and some of these buttons I'm not sure what they do and theres no "hover" so you can't get a tooltip on them. I tried to add a template but when I clicked the button it just didn't do anything, I'm not sure I'm doing it right. The main interface doesn't fit on the screen at 100%, if you work on multiple documents and need to use the pane on the left and see all of the document on the right then you will have to scroll horizontally a lot.

Myspace main page loaded slowish. Theres some sorta embed video about election2008 at the top of the page, it runs well. But as soon as you scroll arround the audio chops out and the page is hard to scroll; it becomes sluggish. Then I clicked on that and went to the myspace/election2008 and theres a bigger video of the same one , and that video is very choppy and sluggish on it's own but audio is ok. also for having a lot of images and whatnot on that myspace page it was still ok to navigate. Not so sluggish after the movie was stoped.

Gmail, slow to load, works great afterwards.

Newegg. Pages render quickly. Checkout is clean and free of any graphical anomolies and errors. Have to horizontally scroll a lot to make use of the checkout. Was unable to tell if I was "secure". I'm used to IE with the lil lock icon. When I searched for Nokia N810 there was no results found !

Amazon. Renders slow; not as smooth as newegg. I'm not sure what happened, I looked up to type this out and went back to the Nokia and Amazon page was frozen, I had to restart the browser. Pages hard to navigate with touch and drag, really could only use the scrollbars. Not enough whitespace and for some reason when theres a popup image for a product, it makes touch screen scrolling non-responsive. Some products have miniature video reviews, like other pages audio is good but video is a slideshow. Theres a couple really large videos...I didn't try but i'd imagein if the small ones bring the Nokia to its knees the big ones would probbaly lock it up.

akihabaranews. Renders quick, navigation is smooth on main page. Articles with big images make it sluggish but manageable, not much to read usualy anyways. For the videos...audio is good, video is choppy like others.

Hope this helps !


All of these pages were tested with Nokia N810, OS 2008 version 1.2007.42-19, fullscreen, battery power.

thanks for your test. i bought a fujitsu u810 but i still want to get the n810. since all the compusa closed in my area, no one else carries them unless i buy online. im just the impatient type. i would rather buy stuff in stock rather than order online. i might just have to make that call tomorrow.

Anyone else notice that cnn.com doesn't scroll like other sites do?
Is it bad programming on their end?

I find it anoying.
cj

After I closed the full page orbitz advertisment ya CNN doesn't apear to allow touch scrolling for me either. I could only scroll with the scrollbars

I think this is the thread that might keep me from buying a Nokia IT. I want a media player device that can really handle video well, a device that can handle todays 2.0 websites with ease (ie, more video) and can tether to my cell phone to use its data plan. It sounds like the 810 is sluggish on media heavy sites. This brings me to the question, would the 810 benefit from more ram? Is it possible to upgrade the unit from the paltry 128 MB to something higher? Why not 1 gig? Wouldn't more ram assist with what seems like the 810's inability to handle heavier websites (and most websites aren't getting any lighter)?

Damn, I thought I had finally found the device for me.

For that matter, for those on this forum who have an EEE, does it handle some of the aforementioned websites any better? I feel like an EEE is about 4 times bigger of a device than I want. I want something mostly screen, a slide out keyboard, can handle my audio and video needs (mostly video), can handle any website I want to visit (not only in respects to performance, but also a good size screen WITH a high resolution) and can do all of this all at the same time (handle multi-tasking well) and fit in my pocket. Oh, and be under $500.

Is this too much to ask?

I have a Kubuntu machine here. It is 500mhz and only has 128 megs of ram. It runs all these sites much better than the Nokia does. I think the problem lies more on the software than the hardware. If anything, it could probbaly use a few more Mhz rather than more ram I think.

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashp...fo/systemreqs/

As you can see here , the Linux requirment is much higher because of poor support for flash on linux in general.

I think the issue has a lot to do with unrealistic expectation for a mobile device. There's a fine balance between battery life, size, and performance. Better performance gets you crappier battery life and more size, better battery life gets you less performance and more size, and more size gets you better performance and better battery life.

As far as the NITs are concerned, they are about the best balance of size, battery life, and performance available. Pocketable, good battery life, with acceptable performance. Sure, an Eee or a PepperPad would get you better performance, but they certainly aren't pocketable and the PepperPad doesn't have nearly the battery life of the NITs.

With this in mind, you'll realize how impressive a device the N810 really is. But, if you can't handle the compromises, then you should probably wait for the N900 which is guaranteed to be much, much faster.

There is a lot more to flawless video playback and heavy Web code then just RAM. (which can be set to 256MB or higher via the addition of swap) CPU speed, video chip/acceleration/bus, hardware decoders, optimized software, etc all play a part and come at a cost. (size, cost, heat, battery life, ...) Asking a pocket size device to handle any heavy 2.0 website and video "with ease" (and at big-box prices) is too much to ask. For the sites I frequent, the N800 has been great though. Waaaaaay beter then any of my previous mobile devices.