Web browsing with Opera 9.X painfully slow on X51V for anyone else?

[flexo]

I've been hearing all this hype about the Opera 9.X browser being so much better than PIE in every respect, so I finally tossed the latest beta on my X51V and gave it a spin.

Now I didn't expect it to compete with the browsing experience of my laptop (3GB of memory vs. 30MB), but still I didn't think it would be as slow as it was. Even with the CPU maxed out at 667MHz, loading times for even modestly scripted websites still took minutes instead of seconds.

Most pages actually seemed to render correctly compared to PIE, which was a major improvement. I suppose what I'm really wondering is how anyone can treat web browsing on a pda as much more than a toy/emergency last-resort given their current rendering speed. Certainly it isn't something I would ever consider paying for.

I admit that my own experience with mobile web browsers is rather limited, and I know that most newer web-enabled phones have a lot more than 30MB of system memory free. Is it just a problem with the X51V's limited memory then? What are your experiences?

[Konrad Pierce]

My first question: is your Axim always stable when overclocked @ 667MHz and running PIE? If not, then obviously you won't see any improvement running other browsers. (I personally keep my X51v at "factory" 624MHz; it's inclined to suck the battery dry and crash within minutes if set any higher. Different units are sometimes capable of more, sometimes - rarely - less.)

Anyhow, I tried out Opera Mini on WM5K17 (my favourite WM OS build for this device) for a while; it doesn't appear remarkably faster or slower than the integrated PIE. Maybe a few pages load a bit faster, maybe a few scripts hang a little now and then, PDF reading is a nightmare under either browser.

So I don't think I can really answer your questions. This is probably the first time I've hit the internet on a PDA in about a year; I generally despise surfing on a puny little screen that can hardly display a dozen lines of text (and a 2-3" cellphone QVGA is even worse!) ... if you find internet generally unacceptable on your PDA then just don't use it for that purpose. I either use desktops or my laptop for all such stuff, it just takes less time and I find it far more satisfying ...

64MB is a bit constraining, but really shouldn't have too much impact on your browsing speed. Assuming you haven't filled a lot of it up with installed apps, data, etc. You can always upgrade the unit to 128MB, or pay someone like PPCTechs to do it for you.