BlackBerry Bold browser walk through
Bored at work? Counting down those hours until you’re free? Hopefully this will help take your mind off of things. The biggest request we’ve been getting so far regarding the Bold is to post a browser walk through. We’re about to take you on a magical journey, friends, to BlackBerry Bold browser land. Somewhere you’ve never been before. Just for kicks we included some screen shots of the iPhone’s browser loading the same web pages, but as you can see, the Bold does a pretty decent job at banging sites. Hit the jump for all the pics and our comments!
As you can see, the browser renders pages worlds better than previous browsers on the BlackBerry OS. It’s a welcome change, but it’s still not perfect. It doesn’t do a great job with our header.
This is still in the initial view mode. All you have to do to zoom in is press in the trackball. You can do this as many times as you’d like until you get the desired zoom level.
Don’t get too freaked out with the jaggedness of the text here. It looks very clean and sharp on the device itself. Images also look better than in the screen shots.
Like eBay? Well then, you’d obviously like to check it out from your BlackBerry Bold.
While the browser handles a lot of pages with no problem, there are some sites that the Bold doesn’t play nice with. As you can see, the Bold didn’t render anything in the upper left box, the lower right box, and there’s still a decent amount of content missing.
This is the default browser screen you are greeted with. Anyone running a semi-recent version of the BlackBerry OS will be perfectly accustomed to this.
Here’s where things get a little tricky… Since the BlackBerry has a huge following, many sites have created BlackBerry-optimized versions of their web pages. The issue is that since the Bold is still seen as a BlackBerry, it serves up the optimized pages instead of what you’d really like to see. CNN does the same thing, and there’s no option on either site to exit “BlackBerry mode”. Though we’re sure this will be fixed soon enough.
We also checked out CNET to test the Bold’s rendering abilities. It did pretty well here, but again, there’s a lot of blank space, and even worse, the left column is actually all the way down on the page when it’s displayed on the Bold. Below are the iPhone browser images of the same sites…
Want us to test some more sites? Let us know in the comments and we’ll update this post with them!
Tags: blackberry bold, browser, exclusive, iphone 3g
I browse on my phone, b/c at work, many many many sites are blocked and I’d rather not have my company having a saved file of any questionable sites I may visit.
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Let it be known, Ken is a perv.
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Can u also include a comparison shot for Opera Mini for Blackberry? Would like to see if we have a better experience with Opera Mini as compare to BB Browser.
Thanks.
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@DAN- I agree, web browsing on a cell phone is a toy. The tech isn’t there yet… I suspect in a few more years or so, when we have a “5G” and SXVGA on a Blackberry will it really replace a laptop.
I notice there are a lot of comments about surfing at work, if your that bored you need a new job. But then again I know many of the readers are kids and college students, so its understandable.
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Looks like Opera Mini to me…
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you wouldnt play world of warcraft on your blackberry anyway…
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The browser is an important part of the phone. I think in the case of BlackBerry, you buy it (or more likely, receive it from your company) for the Outlook email and calendar connectivity. It is the king of those features. I wouldn’t trade my Curve for an iPhone, because great Outlook ability is more valuable to me than great Web ability. I routinely set up meetings and invite half a dozen people, or write 4-10 paragraph emails, on my Curve. Those tasks would be painful on an iPhone’s virtual keyboard, even assuming my company allows the iPhone to connect to the Outlook server, which I doubt.
All that said - the browser is important and valuable. I spend lots of time using the browser in off hours - googling stuff, checking a message board, ordering pizza from Papa John’s … a better browser is a big plus. But I agree that a direct comparison with the iPhone is pointless. The iPhone is gonna have a better browser experience. That’s more or less a given. The physical keyboard is the tradeoff there.
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The iPhone’s browser is very nice no doubt; however BlackBerry devices are built under the following premises:
- Security
- Network Efficiency
- Battery Life
That said, iPhone cannot touch Blackberry on these three categories therefore BlackBerry devices are still the king of mobile computing for the enterprise or anyone that’s serious about a true mobile solution.
BlackBerry uses the same amount of data in a whole month as the iPhone uses in a single day… BlackBerry devices battery (including the Bold) will last for a whole day while the iPhone lasts for 5-6 hours tops (assuming they are used with all the radios on)….
So as far as I’m concerned (and yes it’s my opinion) iPhone does not meet the requirements and it’s still a toy… nuff said.
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Can you check how Yahoo and Google look on the Bold, because when I look at it on my Shadow it looks pretty WACK!!
OH yeah what company is going to carry the Bold??
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It would be great if you could see what http://www.techmeme.com and http://windows.alltop.com look like. I think those might be a bit challenging.
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Opera Mini works perfectly on my BB. It loads sites perfectly and honestly probably lots better than the browser on my BB.
If I ever have any problems viewing sites on the BB browser (i feel that it’s a bit quirkier), i can just go use Opera Mini and view the site just fine.
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For me the scroll wheel is too annoying to use full time.
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From reading everyone’s posts, we’re saying 1)it’s not as good as an iPhone and 2)not as good as a Palm Treo Pro.
Worth waiting for? No.
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