There once was a time when browsing the Internet from a smartphone was at worst a fanciful notion and at best an exercise in frustration. But that's all changed thanks to the reasonably fast (though still relatively expensive) data connections offered by most mobile carriers, coupled with the increasing availability of Wi-Fi enabled smartphones.

These days, many smartphones can offer a very satisfying browsing experience, and a good example is Nokia's recent crop of Symbian S60-based devices. We'll look at some of the differences between Nokia's latest S60 browser and a popular third-party alternative, Opera Mobile 8.65 for S60.

Nokia S60 Browser
Nokia's latest S60 browser can be found on many of the company's E and N Series devices, including the E60, E61, E70, N71, N80, and N91. (We used an N80 for our comparison.) On these devices, you actually get two different browsers to choose from-- a Web browser and a Services browser.

The Services browser, which is the default option, supports both standard HTML and the more and mobile-optimized content created with WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) or WML (Wireless Markup Language).

When you use the Services browser to access a site that offers WAP/WML content, you get a lightweight page devoid of most if any graphics, which makes the page load much faster as well as easier to navigate. The Services browser doesn't use a cursor, you navigate pages by using the phone's directional pad to move between text links.


Nokia Services Mode

Nokia's Web browser, on the other hand, (which is usually found under Web in the My own folder) is only designed to work with regular web content so it displays all pages with their original formatting, just as they would on a PC browser.

That can be good, and it can be bad.

A notable downside to this approach is that it typically requires a lot of horizontal scrolling in order to view and access certain parts of the page. For this reason, with the Web browser you still navigate by using the D-pad, but you use it to control a conventional cursor.


Nokia Browser Normal Mode

The Web browser makes navigating back and forth between pages more convenient than the Services browser through the use of keypad shortcuts. For example, you can use numeric keys to open bookmarks (1), return to a previous page (3), switch between open pages (6), or type in a new address (9). (This is somewhat less convenient on a slider-type phone like the N80, where the keypad is normally concealed.) Another nice feature of Nokia's Web Browser is that when you press the Back soft key you can cycle through and select from thumbnails of all your open pages.

As mentioned above, accessing a large and complex web page designed for a full-size display on a smartphone's small and low resolution screen can be a challenge, so Nokia's Web browser includes a Page Overview feature that can help make the task easier and cut down on excessive scrolling.


Nokia Browser Overview Feature

When using the browser, a press of the 8 key calls up a miniaturized thumbnail of the page and a special cursor that you can use to zoom in on a specific area of the page. A similar feature, dubbed "minimap", detects when you scroll a page for a given distance in a one direction, and then overlays a translucent thumbnail image of the entire page that you can navigate it in the same way.

Opera Mobile 8.65 for Symbian S60
Opera's newest S60 browser is Opera Mobile 8.65 for over two dozen Nokia S60 phones (as well as a few Samsung and Panasonic models). Although it costs $29 to buy, you can download a fully-functional 30-day trial version. On a handful of models where a version of Opera Mobile is pre-installed (like the 668x series, N70, and N90), you can upgrade to version 8.65 for free.

When you launch Nokia's browser it helpfully takes you directly to the Bookmarks menu, but Opera's startup behavior is arguably even more convenient. When you fire up Opera Mobile, it displays a home page from which you can enter an URL, conduct a Google search, or find links to the last 10 web pages you visited. Unlike the Nokia browser, Opera Mobile doesn't use a conventional cursor for navigation-—you instead use the d-pad to move between links on the page.


Opera Homepage

Opera Mobile makes even greater use of keyboard shortcuts than Nokia's browser. Every numeric key (0-9) has a pre-programmed function, and you can customize each one. By default, shortcuts must be preceded by the # key, but you can change that so only the numeric key is required. There's also a zoom function that's not as convenient as Nokia's Page Overview or minimap features, but it lets you get a look at the entire contents of a large page.

Opera Mobile's default display mode shows pages in their normal orientation, so a fair amount of horizontal scrolling back and forth is normally required. One of the nice features of the browser is its fit to screen mode which renders the page in a pure vertical orientation, eliminating the need to scroll horizontally.

Fit to screen mode is especially handy on lower-res screen, but it was even useful on our 352 x 416 pixel N80 display since that resolution is still low by the PC standards most pages are designed for. Fit to screen mode is designed to work with any Web site and more often than not it works quite well, though we did encounter a few instances where it would inappropriately stretch out a single link vertically, making it tough to read.


Opera Fit to Screen Mode

Another way Opera Mobile tries to mitigate the effects of limited display real estate is with its full screen mode. This mode eliminates the web page title bar and soft button labels found and the top and bottom of the screen, which allows you to dedicate every pixel to the display of web page content. The soft buttons still work in full screen mode, though without the labels it's up to you to remember what those buttons do.

This can be especially challenging since they're context sensitive and change function depending on what you're doing with the browser. (For example, on several occasions we accidentally closed the browser when we merely intended to go back on page.)


Opera Normal Mode

Both Nokia's S60 3 Edition browser and Opera Mobile 8.65 are excellent browsers that let you browse the Internet from your S60 mobile device with few significant compromises, and for most, we think choosing between them will come down to personal preference in the end.