Smartphone Browser Shootout: Palm, BlackBerry, HTC Vs. iPhoneSmartphone Browser Shootout: Palm, BlackBerry, HTC Vs. iPhone

This spring has seen a flood of new smartphone models, many of them with larger, more Web-friendly screens. At the same time, mobile service providers are aggressively marketing expanded second- and third-generation data networks. So does this mean that the experience of browsing the Web on a smartphone has been dramatically improved?

I surveyed the Web-browsing capabilities of three new phones -- the Palm Treo 755p, the RIM BlackBerry Curve, and the HTC Wing -- and compared them to the current favorite, the Apple iPhone. They were chosen because, like the iPhone, each is the newest model in a distinct product line, and they're readily available from one or another of the major mobile service providers in the United States. There are other great phones, like the Nokia E61i, for example, that may give good browse but don't meet these two criteria. (One major smartphone OS isn't represented on the list, either: Symbian, once a front-runner, doesn't have a pony in the current race -- although it's got one comer, the Samsung SGH-i400, announced in April, but not currently scheduled to make it to the United States.)

Along the way, I found three rules that govern how well a smartphone handles Web browsing:

Rule #1: Does it have a full keyboard?
To browse the Web you have to enter URLs into the browser, which can be difficult enough on a normal keyboard. As a result, any phone that requires you to hit the same key three times to type a single letter is worthless for Web browsing. The keyboard can be real or virtual -- that is, implemented as hardware buttons or spots on a touchscreen .

There's not really much difference between the two -- whether real or virtual -- they're both difficult to use because of the small size of the keys, and the need to overlay the punctuation and number characters on the alpha keys. But either is better than a 12-key pad.

Most current smartphones offer QWERTY keyboards, which arrange the keys in standard keyboard order (the top row of letters reads "qwerty," hence the name). While most smartphones make a big deal of their QWERTY layouts, they shouldn't, because they're promising standardization they don't deliver. For example, the placement of necessary symbols like "@" and "/" seems to be entirely random (like the placement of the backspace key on laptops).

Key size makes a major difference in usability. As smartphones have gotten smaller, they've become more difficult to enter text on. The original BlackBerrys, which were about the size of a piece of toast, had keyboards and keys significantly bigger than the current generation of devices like the BlackBerry Curve, which is more the size of a biscotti. Fortunately, we're seeing a reversal of the trend with smartphonesthat have slide-out keyboards like the T-Mobile's HTC Wing and AT&T's 8525. Because the keyboards run long-ways on the devices, the extra width allows for much wider key spacing, and better usability.

Rule #2: The more pixels, the better.
For browsing the Web on a phone, bigger screens and higher screen resolutions are both better, but there's a practical limit to both -- the phone has to be small enough to be a phone. The result has been a design point for smartphones that borrows from earlier PDAs like the Palm -- a square screen with a 240 x 240 pixel resolution and measuring two inches or less on a side.

To maximize usability of these tiny screens, manufacturers have traveled two well-trod paths. One way is to increase the resolution of the display while keeping it the same size -- the Palm Treo 700 series, for example, has a 320 x 320 screen.

The other way is to keep the resolution the same but increase the size of the screen. The HTC Wing and similar smartphones turn their 320x240 displays sideways to create more real estate. That's 76,800 pixels versus the 57,600 offered by the typical square 240 x 240 phone display. While that's not a staggering difference, it is quantifiably better (33% better, to be exact). And because it makes room for a wider keyboard, the browsing experience feels easier.

The iPhone's 320 x 480 screen puts it in a class by itself. With 153,600 pixels to light up, images look better. Text renders better, too -- and this is one key to the breathtaking clarity of the iPhone screen. With all that resolution, and a rendering engine empowered to make use of it, the iPhone can present visuals no other phone can touch.

But Web pages are mostly designed to be presented in 1,310,720 pixels (that's 1280 x 1024) and 225 square inches of screen real estate (that's a 15-inch monitor) or more, rather than the 7.84 square inches of a 2.8-inch PDA screen. There are efforts to fix this, such as the .mobi domain, a top-level domain dedicated to sites that adhere to a set of standards for presenting Web sites well on handhelds. However, for the most part, it mean redesigning Web sites that work on desktop browsers, and not every site makes the effort.

Ultra-mobile PCs may eventually fill a niche in the PC ecology between smartphones and laptops, making Web browsing work better by providing bigger keyboards and bigger screens, but they won't be as portable as smartphones. The winning devices will be those that squeeze more resolution and better features into that 8 to 10 square inches of a screen a smartphone can put in your hand.

Rule #3: Browser features matter -- a lot.
Certain features of the browser become more important as the screen gets smaller -- and, all too often, those features go missing. Multiple browser windows, bookmarks, browser add-ins, Java and Flash support, even simple onscreen controls for Stop, Back, and Reload, are all basic to the experience of browsing the Web, yet they can be hard to find on handhelds.

On a desktop computer, you probably navigate the Web by choosing bookmarks, keying in URLs, and clicking on links in pages. All those things are much harder to do on a handheld than a desktop. Because of the limitations of the keyboards, typing URLs becomes something to be avoided, but where you might set up a toolbar row of links in a desktop browser, that's not an option on a handheld. There are bookmarks or "favorites" in both Windows Mobile and Palm OSes, at least, but you can't pick from a drop-down list -- you have to leave the browser screen to see the bookmarks screen.

And how many browser windows do you typically have open at once? If you're like me, it can be anywhere from three or four to a dozen. On Windows Mobile and Palm phones, however, there's no multiple windows and no tabbed browsing. It's amazing how constricting that feels -- and its one of the primary reasons to go to the trouble of installing a third-party browser like Opera that does tabbed windows.

The limited processing power and memory of handheld devices plays as much of a role here as limited screen real estate. Flash and Java support is available for some phone OSes, at least in theory, but more often they cause "Out of Memory" warnings than real enjoyment.

Most conspicuous in their absence from cell phone browsers are effective controls for manipulating the partial view of the current Web page on the screen. If the Web page is 1280 x 1024 pixels and you can only see 320 x 240 pixels of that at a time - the view through the keyhole, as it were -- you need some good controls for moving that keyhole around the page and zooming in and out. For the most part smartphones and their browsers don't provide them.

Palm Treo 755p
Service Company: Sprint
List Price: $579 (w/o service plan)

The limited memory available in handheld devices has been the major bottleneck in their Web browsing capabilities. Historically, the browsers in handhelds were designed to protect them from Web pages rather than display those pages. Special protocols like WAP and iMode were developed to substitute for standard Web coding and transmission protocols. Most cell phone browsers today support at least WAP and HTML -- more or less.

The Blazer browser in the Treo 755p is typical. It is a WAP/HTML browser that has been upgraded with support for additional Web features over time (it was rewritten for the Palm Tungsten and early Treo smartphones). On paper, at least, Version 4.x offers good support for standard Web and handheld protocols: HTML, XHTML, WML, SSL, cHTML, JavaScript, cascading style sheets, and cookies.

Like most handheld browsers, Blazer chokes on anything that requires Java, Flash, or lots of memory, which naturally coincides with the most advanced, desirable Web applications. Google Maps and a streaming media player are burned into the phone's ROM to counter some of these shortcomings.

Even results for straightforward Web pages can be . . . variable. It turns out that the Blazer browser has some key settings that can affect how faithfully it renders the Web page, and what works best in a Blazer window is not always the truest to the original Web page code.

For example: information.com's parent company is CMP Technology. If you want to find the address of CMP's home office on the Web you can go to the home page at http://www.cmp.com and click on "Contact Us" in the upper right corner. Once you're onn the Contacts page, you click the "Locations" button on the left side, and there it is.

But in the Palm Blazer browser, you won't see the "Contact Us" link -- in normal view, the link is styled right off the page. You have to go into Preferences, select "Fast Mode," and disable cascading style sheets. In other words, disable one of the fancier features of the site, beloved by Web designers, and you get the information you're looking for. Fortunately, Blazer makes it easy for you to flip back and forth between normal and fast modes by using a little lightning-bolt icon that's one of several useful navigation functions conveniently placed on the title bar.

In Preferences you can also elect not to download images, which can speed up the display of the page, and select either "Optimized Mode" (which forces the page contents into a sort of stacked, single-column display) or "Wide Page Mode" (which actually does a reasonable job of rendering CMP's site.)

"Wide" is, however, a relative term. The Treo presents the smallest screen of the four phones. It squeezes its relatively high-resolution 320 x 320 pixels into a 2.4-inch diagonal. It is bright and sharp, but size still matters when you're trying to look at Web pages.

The small screen size can cause one other inconvenience: While the browser puts up vertical and horizontal scroll bars whenever necessary, it's easier to use the D-pad to navigate the page -- especially if you're a lefty, and your hand covers the whole screen when you try to use the stylus on a scroll bar.

Research In Motion BlackBerry Curve
Service Company: AT&T
Price: $450 (w/o service plan)

Historically, the BlackBerry Web browser hasn't gotten much respect. This may be because RIM, the BlackBerry's maker, has focused on optimizing the browser as a client application for displaying corporate applications -- something for the intranet rather than the Internet.

There have been changes over time to make the BlackBerry more appealing to consumers, but the Curve (or the 8300, if you track BlackBerry models by their numerics) is still a BlackBerry -- you still get a choice of "BlackBerry browser" or "Internet browser," terminology that covers proxy settings that aim HTTP requests at either a corporate Mobile Data System (MDS) server or the mobile carrier's Web service, and you can configure the Curve to emulate a variety of legacy browsers for compatibility with corporate apps.

This attention to detail is a plus -- the BlackBerry Curve's browser offers controls that go beyond the Treo's. However, it's also a minus, because the user interface isn't as good. You get more flexible, finer-grained control over the browser. (For example, you can enable or disable support not only for style sheets, but for JavaScript, HTML tables, pop-ups, background images, and more.) But the convenience is lost in menu navigation: The Curve lacks the onscreen control icons that distinguish the Treo's browser, and you have to root around in the menus to make changes that might improve the display of a page in the browser.

Greater control notwithstanding, the Curve had the same problem with the CMP address test that the Treo did -- with style sheets disabled, the "Contact Us" link is clearly visible, but with "Support Style Sheets" checked in the browser configuration menu, it's hidden.

The Curve's default display of a Web page, called View Mode, is about the same thing as the Treo's Optimized Mode -- a view that disassembles the page into its piece parts of graphics and text, and stacks them like children's blocks. You can scroll straight down this jumble using the phone's tiny trackball substitute for a D-pad. There's a Preview Mode, as well, that puts a miniaturized schematic map of the complete page up to the right of the View Mode, so that as you scroll you can see your location, approximately.

The Curve has a 320 x 240-pixel display that's not tiny -- it's a 2.8-inch diagonal -- but it doesn't take all the advantage it could of that screen because it lacks what the Treo browser calls Whole Page Mode, a view that respects the original design of the page.

The Curve's main menu is overly long, a symptom that should be very familiar to anybody who ever suffered from "BlackBerry thumb" -- using the clickwheel to roll through the menus and clicking to make a selection. The little trackball first introduced on the BlackBerry Pearl is not as usable as the clickwheel was. It supports 2-D navigation, which the clickwheel didn't, but it doesn't feel as accurate as a D-pad for navigation.

The long menu at least means you can find what you want. There are both "Bookmarks" and "Add Bookmark" links on it, which make this important function relatively easy to find. "Go To" and "History" are here as well to give you an easy way to enter a URL. But having these features available on the menu is one step less convenient than having them directly accessible from the browser interface, as they are on the Treo.

HTC Wing
Service Company: T-Mobile
Price: $500 (w/o service plan)

The Wing is an HTC product that looks like a candy-bar cell phone with an exceptionally large screen instead of a number pad. Then you turn it sideways and slide the front plate up to reveal the QWERTY keyboard. This personality change yields a horizontal screen with a 3:2 aspect ration and a 2.4-inch diagonal.

The Wing is the newest entry in a line of smartphones that has been a big hit for HTC -- its forebears include the 8525 sold by AT&T (where it's called a "PDA" device rather than a smartphone), the PPC 6700 sold by Sprint (soon to be replaced by the 6800), and the i-mate KJAM sold by other global service providers. All are about the same phone, give or take some size differences and a feature or two. All, importantly, are Windows Mobile devices.

That's good, because the Windows Mobile platform brings along a lot of media support for free. But it also brings along Internet Explorer -- in earlier versions of Windows Mobile it was called Pocket IE; in the current version 6, it's called IE Mobile, or IEM for short.

The Wing provides a good physical platform for Web browsing. At 320 x 240 pixels and a 2.8-inch diagonal, its screen is big. Its slider keyboard is very usable. Unlike other HTC phones, the slider opens to the right, which puts the D-pad on the left when you hold the Wing horizontally -- good for note-taking righties, perhaps, but not so good for lefties.

IEM takes good advantage of the screen real estate with several display modes. One Column mode works much like it does on the Treo and Curve; Fit To Screen is a compromise between the original page design as it might appear in a desktop browser and the one-column mash-up with goal of eliminating horizontal scrolling, and Desktop keeps the same layout and size as a desktop browser -- with all the problems of steering the keyhole view around the page that implies.

Unfortunately, what isn't available is any more flexible control over the browser display like that in the Curve or even the Treo -- especially, no switch to turn off CSS support.

Windows Mobile has been justly criticized for its clunky menu structure that can hide frequently used phone features several layers down. IEM doesn't escape this problem. There are no onscreen icons for browser functions (the row of icons in the title bar is devoted to phone functions, even when you're in the browser) and everything you want to do is buried under the Favorites and Menu menus -- sometimes three levels under.

IEM isn't all about negatives. Microsoft has done a lot of work to make Windows Mobile a full-fledged corporate application platform -- it's not just called Windows, it works as much as possible like desktop Windows under the covers. IEM benefits from this by supporting a wide variety of Web standards (though sometimes in true Microsoft fashion, which is not necessarily to support the established standard, but to support what Microsoft thinks the standard ought to be). Depending on the version of Windows Mobile (there are two), you can even get support for more or less standard things like Adobe Flash (it's supported in Windows Mobile Pro, which runs on touchscreen smartphones including the Wing).

Apple iPhone
Service Company: AT&T
Price: $499 (4GB with service plan), $599 (8GB with service plan)

Very little that has been said about the other phones applies to Apple's new iPhone. There's no need to compare the Safari browser on the iPhone with a desktop browser. It is a desktop browser.

Tap the address bar with a finger (no stylus necessary) and the intelligently designed onscreen keyboard opens, complete with keys for the period, forward slash, and even a ".com" shortcut key right there, not hidden under an ALT key or on a second screen. Touch the Go button and the page appears. Not in "1 Column Mode" or squeezed into the screen. It appears as itself -- small, of course, but complete.

Too small? Touch your thumb and forefinger to the screen and spread them apart. The page grows in proportion. Touch the screen again to drag the page in any direction, not just up/down or right/left.

Notice what you haven't done yet: You haven't opened a single menu.

And there are only six icons on the screen: a plus sign (to add a bookmark), a circular arrow (the Go button), Previous, Next, a book (to open bookmarks), and a stack of pages bearing a number. The number is how many Web pages you have open, and touching the icon opens the page gallery - flick through it to find the page you want, and touch to open it.

If you're a lover of good user interface, this is as good as it currently gets. Yet wonderful as it is, it's only as good as the support it gets from the iPhone hardware. The multi-touch screen technology, in particular, is a key element of the iPhone's success at Web browsing. Multi-touch supports a vocabulary of touchscreen gestures that replace hundreds of menus. Additionally, the iPhone has enough memory at its disposal to support multiple open windows, a huge usability feature. The screen redraws after you zoom into or out of a page almost instantly so you see it at the best fidelity -- clearest pictures, sharpest fonts. And screen resolution of 480 x 320 pixels is one giant leap for handheld devices.

There are precisely three settings that affect the browser display, all listed under "Security" on the iPhone's browser settings menu: JavaScript on/off, Plug-ins on/off, and Block Pop-ups on/off. No controls for CSS -- it just works (the CMP page looks as good on the iPhone as it does on a desktop). No display modes -- no need for them, because you interact directly with the page to set the display you want.

The iPhone isn't perfect -- it has some of the same problems with memory-hogging Web applications that other smartphones do. There's no Flash support, for starters, no Java. But there is real Web browsing, and that makes all the difference.

The usual word for Apple interfaces is "intuitive." They're not. There's no intuitive reason why the plus sign beside the Safari address bar means "add a bookmark" rather than "open the history list" -- in fact, it makes rather more sense for it to open the history list, because that's something you do more often than adding a bookmark. (The history list is the first item on the bookmarks page, if you're curious.)

The iPhone browser interface is a success not because it's intuitive, but because the interface is discoverable at a level almost below conscious thought. Once the iPhone teaches you that touching the screen pays off in control, you're off and running.

Conclusion

One thing that became obvious to me as I looked at these various Web interfaces is that data speed isn't as important as good software. Even with improvements like the upgrade of Windows Mobile to Version 6 and the spread of touchscreen support on smartphones, not much has changed. If you didn't like the PocketPC there's still a lot not to like about Windows Mobile and its Mini-Me version of Internet Explorer. Palm still hasn't delivered its next-generation operating system for the Treo line, and BlackBerry's browser remains essentially unchanged.

What the Treo, Blackberry and Wing have in common is a reliance on a menu-driven user interface (taken to an extreme in Windows Mobile), hardware that simply isn't up to the task of supporting a fully functional Web browser, and browser software that tries to do something like Web browsing with both its hands tied behind its back. Going forward these deficiencies will be even more obvious as Web services and Web-delivered applications get more sophisticated.

The good news, as you might expect, is the Apple iPhone. The genius of Apple is its ability, over and over again, to completely reinvent, from the ground up, the user interface for hardware, and to support it with brilliant software. Web browsing on the iPhone is a paradigm shift, a completely different experience -- just as the BlackBerry was, in its time, a paradigm shift.

The elements of the technology that makes the iPhone so different will find their way into other devices, just as the BlackBerry's thumbpad and push e-mail have become more or less standard on smartphones. Touchscreens and direct interaction with the Web page will become standards of their own sort because they've come along just in time as computing, both personal and business, moves to the Web.