The eternal debate between using the built-in browser in S60 3rd Edition or Opera Mini to surf the web has always intrigued me. For a long time, I was an unconditional fan of the S60 browser, for the reason that it’s built-in, fast enough, offers true rendering of pages, and most of all isn’t a Java application. That’s until a few days ago, when I tried using the Epocrates Online site.
To those of you who aren’t in the medical field, Epocrates is one amazing database of drug information, and the best thing is that it’s free. Epocrates has a native client for Windows Mobile devices as well as Palm, but there is no S60 client. Recently, Epocrates ported their Online site, which offers a good part of the client functionality, to the iPhone. Being that both the iPhone and the S60 browser are built on the same Webkit base, I decided to give it a go on my N95.
I pointed my S60 browser to m.epocrates.com/iphone and waited as the site opened. I was able to check the first page, write down the name of the drug I was looking for, and even click through the suggestions. Everything worked fine until the actual drug page opened. There was a window on top of the page on which I had to click “Continue”, problem is that I couldn’t scroll to that “Continue” no matter what I did. I would press up and down, and the scrolling cursors would move but the page remained still. I even tried zooming out to 50% and rotating to landscape thinking the “Continue” would be come reachable, but it didn’t. Here are some screenshots with the last one showing the window on top of the page:
That’s when I thought about using Opera Mini. I visited m.epocrates.com/iphone . The page opened fine, I was able to cue in my search item but there is no way I could get it to actually perform the search. On the S60 browser, the moment I move the cursor out of the text box, the search is triggered, on Opera Mini, I can’t move out of the text box without clicking on something else. Bad. I went back to the drug page on S60 browser, checked the page address and back to Opera Mini where I input the full address. The page opened and I was able to scroll and close that window to view the full drug information. And here are the screenshots from Opera Mini:
This is an example of how both browsers work in harmony, where the limits of one are overcome by the second and vice versa. I am now using them in tandem (get S60 to search for the drug, then grab the link and go to opera mini) in order to check Epocrates and haven’t hit any other bump along the road. If you have ever faced such a problem with a page you couldn’t view on one of these browsers, try checking it with the other. Who knows, it might work, just like it did to me!
