Web browsing with TX (Blazer) -Impossible??

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I just bought my first PDA. I choose the TX because of the WiFi. I thought I would be able to go online, via hotspots, when away from home. On the positive side: it was very easy to set up and connect, even without reading any manual. The problem is, that I only see the top left corner of the webpages, if they load at all!

Fx: It takes several minutes to scroll through a normal webpage, say from an airline company. I'd be lost scrolling from one field to another before I could change my e-ticket for the return trip!

Are there any solutions to this problem? (other browsers for Palm???)
 
There are significant differences between a desktop pc/laptop browser and a browser for the PDA/Mobile. PDA browsers (so far as I have seen anyway) can't handle flash, animated icons, etc. It takes a little getting used to when connecting to regular web sites and viewing pages that were designed for full featured browsers. Things just don't line up like you would expect.

However, every day it seems, there are more sites that are capable of presenting web pages based on what your browser can handle. These are called Mobile or WAP sites. I find that some sites use a different URL (see URLs examples listed below) while others can examine the capabilities of your browser and automatically redirect you within their site to browser capable pages for your machine.

You can do a google search for some mobile/WAP sites and/or look for specific links within the favorite sites you visit, they may list special links for "Mobile Users". Try looking here for starters. This is a Yahoo mobile portal. Pages are designed for your browser, they load faster and have less flashy graphics so the more important stuff appears on the page.

Here are a few others:
Yahoo Mobile
WAP Google
WAPCatalog.com
2thumbsWAP
AvantGo

So don't dispair, as you become more familiar with your new machine, you will discover that you made a good choice. You're just going through a paradyme shift. Hope this helps.

Cheers,
John
 
Back in the good old days, when a web page was just tables and text, they were fast loading and not confusing. Now, however, with 90% of most pages graphics, when you get a slower connection, as the Palm Wifi seems to be, it can take some time to load. During that time, you may see things moving around and jumping.

Going to landscape mode helps. Many sites have a PDA optimized area. Here, the pages have few graphics and narrower tables.
 
Thanks for the helpful links John.

I'm still a bit disapointed though. Most of the web pages I've entered, look perfectly normal on my TX, but as I mentioned, I can only see a fraction of it at a time. I had hoped that I might be able to view fx half a page in landscape mode (instead of aprox 1/64). Is there no way this can be solved ?
 
There are other browsers available for Palm OS ... PocketLink, Xiino and EudoraWeb. Apparently with EudoraWeb you shouldn't get the 'annoyances' that you are receiving at the moment. Furthermore, Eudora is the only Palm Web Browser that I know of that supports SSL (Secure Socket Layer). But whether using EudoraWeb will solve your browsing dilemmas, I can't really back up. I have a T|X myself, but haven't had a chance to test it out. But if you want to have a look at EudoraWeb (it's freeware) it's at: http://www.eudora.com/products/unsupported/internetsuite/eudoraweb.html
Not sure if the other browsers are free, but they're worth checking out too ...

The reason why you are getting disapointed with Blazer, is because what Blazer tries to do, is optimize web pages for viewing on PDAs - unlike Internet Explorer on the Pocket PC (which displays everything), but of course, by displaying everything on the PPC, you will find that you have to use the scroll bars a lot!!

You will find the automatic optmizations by Blazer a bit annoying at first, but after a while, you will probably grow to appreciate what it does ... and as jcrick and spectrum have pointed out, using landscape view will help you get used to it a bit quicker. Obviously though, there are downsides to optimization ... also Blazer doesn't support SSL, so don't do any e-commerce or Internet Banking on it!!!

Hope this helps :(

Andrew
 
Whatever browser you choose to use be aware that Blazer renders the page more like you would see it on your PC than any other browser. I suggest you buy and use Uninstall Manager before you try a lot of them. Deleating browsers leave a large amount of orphaned files behind.
 
I'm assuming that you have set the two options to Optimized Mode and Font Small and you're still encountering these problems.

I have a few web sites, where with these settings I get at least a 1/2 page of table data.

fnagle
 
Opera Mini is getting some good reviews over at another forum that I frequent. You might try it but as John points out.....get a good unistall program before cluttering the device.

The blazer on the 650 doesn't seem to act the way that you are describing on your TX but it's not a screaming meanie either.
 
UntiI you mentioned it, I forgot that l played with the settings some when I first started using blazer. Try either checking or unchecking the setting for cascading stye sheets.

I also use fast mode and Optimlzed Mode is on (wide page mode is turned off).
 
Thanks for helping me out!
By reducing font size, I've been able to reduce some of the scrolling. As I've tried it some more, many pages seems to work well with optimized mode.

But some pages (I keep returning to the airline pages I had in mind above) I have to view in wide page mode. (optimized mode mixes or deletes drop down menues.)

Even in wide page mode there are problems with drop down menus (only half of them are responding to point and click.)

I think it all comes down to, me beeing so naive. I thought that a handheld would be able to show a full version of any web page, just smaller.
I only hope that there are problems with MS pocketPC too.... that would be of great comfort.
 
Just as a test, try resizing a browser window on your desktop computer to be the same size as the TX's screen (320 x 480 pixels). Now surf the web with your desktop computer using that small 'screen'. This might be what you could expect to see surfing with a PDA.
 
That's not logic to me. In my mind, I expect computers to behave much like a TV. Small screen, small picture, big screen big picture. No one would buy a small TV for the kitchen if they only got to see the upper left hand corner of the picture they see on the big screen in the living room.

There are probably several good technical explanations for this not to be true, but as I said, I am naive
 
Ted redhair, don't be so harsh on yourself! :) We all have our assumptions about how things should work, and we all learn from our mistakes. PalmBlvd.com is here to help us, so don't feel as though you can't even the silliest of questions (by the way, this wasn't a silly question, because I myself am not 100% clear on the solution to this). But as I and some of the others said, the main reason why Blazer doesn't show the entire page and force you to use the scroll bars, is due to some optimisation feature (I think it's WAP or something?!).

Anyways, to sum up, don't be too critical of yourself, PalmBlvd.com is here to help and at the end of the day, nobody's going to judge you here!! Unless of course you say something really negative about Palm without backing it up! :D

Oh, and FYI, on MS Pocket PC Internet Explorer shows the whole page, but forces you to scroll ... so sorry that couldn't make you feel better :mad: ... well , at least that's what's happening on my old iPaq 1930 - newer ones could be different. But you will soon realise that this is a major pain for a small screen ... so hopefully you can get some consolation out of that ... I quite like the optimisation on my T|X it IS annoying for some sites tho ...

Andrew
 
There is a browser for Palm which will display a page exactly as you describe it, allowing you to zoom in and out of pages with a swipe of a pen. It looks wonderful, its fast and makes browsing on a mobile device a real joy.

There's just one little problem.

The browser is Picsel Browser and its impossible to acquire it or use it legally. Its available on a far east market Palm OS handset only. And there doesn't appear to be any intention on the part of the publisher to make it available for general release. Picsel appear to deal with manufacturers, content providers or network operators exclusively.

Most annoyingly Palm has a relationship with Picsel - the Treo 700w comes with Picsel's PDF viewer bundled...

Pocket IE, on Windows Mobile devices does about as good a job as Blazer in displaying pages -choose between scroll around full page mode or single column mode. Unless you have a VGA device of course, then the experience is much closer to a desktop PC (although you have to use a system hack to make it so).
 
I know what you mean. It seems like computer screens should work like TVs, but somehow they don't. Way back when, a computer monitor that would display video images (VGA or video graphics adapter) was considered a real high resolution. So I figured a TV, which displays video real well, would be a great computer monitor. But a TV is a lousy monitor--older, pre VGA monitors display text a whole lot better.

I guess it comes down to the difference between displaying pictures vs text. You could display a whole web page on a PDA screen as a picture, but I suspect you couldn't read much of it. Still, that might be useful for browsing, if you could read the headlines and zoom in... Maybe that's what Picsel does.
 
First, if you have ever had a tiny handheld TV you may have noticed that you cannot read small text on the screen that you can read on a normal sized TV. The reason is that there are not enough pixels horiz. or vert. to do it. Also, in most cases a larger computer monitor will display more information, not larger images of the same information that a smaller computer monitor displays. So there is a very significant difference between TV and computer display technology. Standard TV always displays 525 scan lines (unless it is an LCD pocket TV). They just make smaller, closer lines on smaller screens. This does not follow through wilth computer monitors.
 
If I may add, the Opera Mini seems to perform very well for speed and format. The only regret is that it keeps the graffiti area on top so viewable area is barely over half the page on the TX. I expect there is or someone may want to program a hack for this.
 
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