What constitutes a successful web browser in 2010. A web browser's job
is to play the internet's web-based content....text, media, spam
(dammit), pictures, graphs, and information. If it fails to play what
the web designers have used in their page design, it's worthless!

In the past, we all put up with some pretty shoddy excuses for web
displays on sellphone-based microcomputers. We called it WAP,
officially. Users had other names for it you wouldn't repeat at a
church social or other social gathering before everyone was drunk and
naked. It left us with a legacy of, frankly speaking, "It Sucks!"

The equipment got better. The processors got faster without requiring a
blower-cooled CPU that ate the batteries in under an hour. Memory got
better, too, and all the silicon got much much cheaper to deploy.
Remember when your notebook computer nearly always needed an outlet to
power it because the "extended" battery was a 30 minute battery and heat
poured out of it like a hair dryer? Going past a few simple emails
headed into unknown territory of shutdowns. New netbooks run for 8 to
15 hours with the display so bright you can actually see it, almost,
outside! We've come a LONG way.

But, smartphones started using that most precious commodity we were
charging $2/KB for...bandwidth. It's why WAP was invented. You could
still charge them a horrible rate for data (but never as high as you
could text message data) and WAP delivered some content free from ads,
which put it at risk as the web was supposed to make a profit selling
spam.

Users demanded more and started refusing to pay $2/KB, even per MB
causing those $500 sellphone bills, cellular bankruptcy. The systems
started to open up...just a little...a tiny concession to user demand.

So, now we're in the iPhone Era and the demand is high from an ignorant
public who is not really looking close enough at what they're paying
for....a trend back into the data charging dark ages with another
tactic...the sellular smartphone designed to NOT use data. WTF?

I hate smartphones that won't even let you look at a webpage. That's
pretty much all of them, including iPhone and its stupid non-
multitasking, low resolution video environment. "They" keep promising
us better. Friends, Droid isn't better........It's just another save-
me-from-user-bandwidth smartphone. It might as well be WAP.....

I spent almost an hour in a busy Verizon company store playing with this
pig today, testing mostly its web-browsing capabilities. The Verizon
fanbois have all promised us the company has turned over a new leaf and
stopped hobbling up the phones, a denial of service. I'd like to say
from what I saw today, that's all bullshit! The Droid is all hobbled up
because it WON'T do what web browsers need to do....PLAY THE WEBPAGES.

Some of the most blatant omissions I found are:

1 - No FLASH. No flash, no content! Goog has proxy served the big
guns. Click a YouTube FLASH video off its webpage, it boots a YouTube
player from the "cloud" that translates FLASH into a really nice youtube
clip player. That's all well and good for Goog and YouTube...but it
won't play http://speedtest.knology.net/ because it has NO FLASH. It
won't play ANY flash-based webpages it hasn't specifically been designed
and proxied to play. Try it. Try http://www.speedtest.net/ to make
sure. It doesn't play, either....nada. How much FLASH playing is in
your internet life? Every webpage is full of it, now! You're not going
to ever play it on a DROID from The Borg.....not allowed.

2 - No media STREAMING, either. Any real web browser will display
http://www.shoutcast.com/ the radio station streaming list of thousands
of online web stations to listen to. Most play in the simplest of MP3
streams, with many using RealPlayer and a small smathering of
Quicktime...very small. Stations also stream in freeware OGG format.
The Borg's Droids will play none of it. Every time I clicked up a
Shoutcast station, Droid took me to a Goog website to intervene, instead
of just PLAYING the station. I don't need google to get between me and
any of the streams from KSEY's cowboy jukebox music. I need for it to
PLAY IT, DAMMIT!.....NOW! It's only streaming MP3 at 28Kbps. I'm sure
we can deliver that without the ****ing beast corporation going
bankrupt!

Realplayer....in your dreams. MP3 streaming....ha ha ha. OGG...what's
that?? Quicktime...This isn't Apple, you know.

3 - No JAVA. National Weather Service and most government webpages
you'd like to see say: "Java is necessary for radar looping and is best
optimized using Java version 1.4.2 or higher.
Go to www.java.com/en for more information regarding Java."...or
something to that effect. No JAVA, no controllable radar displays.
Sorry.

4 - Silverlight. Surely you jest. It won't even play Flash!

The web browser is all hobbled up to SAVE BANDWIDTH.....useless.

After testing just plain web browsing, I returned it to its security
rack shaking my head and the Verizon sales droid moved on quickly to a
more productive sucker.....

The mall's resellers had plenty of Droids but lacked anything resembling
a "buyer". The tire kickers, once they found out the price, fled in
panic....

Useless.....Just like iPhone.



--
Larry