Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, released a new version (beta 1) for the Nokia N8x0 Internet Tablets recently. Here are my first impressions after about 15 minutes of use:
- It supports the virtual on-screen keyboard now, so would be actually usable on the N800.
- Panning the page is very fast! Unfortunately, opening pages is very slow.
- It eats a lot of memory rather quickly and bogs down when the system starts swapping.
- The user interface is going to be awesome, once the speed and memory problems are fixed.
- Going back in history is cumbersome when you have to pan to the side of the page. The hardware back button doesn't seem to work.
- It has a nice large icon, but there's no small version, and this makes the application organizer in the control panel look weird.
JFFS2, which is the file system used for internal flash memory on NITs, compresses all data, which makes free space comparisons weird. I had 5 megs free, freed up 20 more, then installed Fennec (which, the Aplication Manager assured me, required 10 megs) and ended up with 5 megs free.
I'd include a screenshot, but ad-hoc wifi doesn't work between my Thinkpad and my N810 for some reason.