N900 Videos

This video from ubergizmo shows the N900 app launcher being used to start up MicroB, the Maemo web browser that uses the Mozilla rendering engine. A click on a bookmark (with thumbnail image) brings up the ubergizmo website.

As with many websites designed for desktop browsing, the text and images on ubergizmo are unreadably small when displayed on the N900, and there are several ways to zoom in.

Double-tapping on any part of the web page results in that part of the web page being zoomed to fill the width of the screen. This works pretty well. I guess the browser is looking at the width of the enclosing block element in the HTML code. The zooming is not perfect though, as the element does not always quite fill the screen, and sometimes seems offset a little. It’s quite functional though, even if not so smooth and finely-calibrated as the double-tap zoom on the iPhone’s Safari browser.

The second way to zoom in and out is to draw spirals on the screen with your finger: clockwise to zoom in and counter-clockwise to zoom out. This seems tedious compared to “pinch to zoom” on multi-touch screens (the N900’s resistive screen is single-touch), and I think spiral-zoom will get old very fast, although one advantage is that it can (only just!) be done with the thumb while holding the N900 one-handed. The effect is slightly off-putting visually, because the web page starts to pan (move around) before the software sees enough of the gesture to recognise it as a spiral and start zooming.

The third way to zoom is to use the +/- buttons on the top edge of the N900. These are normally used to change the volume, but the web browser uses them for zooming instead. Personally I’d like to be able to use hardware buttons to change the volume on a web page, but it seems this must be done with on-screen controls instead. The button-zooming seems to work well, with a reasonable choice of step size.

The video then shows some more examples of double-tap zooming, including the way the browser interprets double-tap as a “zoom out” command if the page element is already zoomed in. It seems quite usable.

Finally, the screen appears to freeze up and go blank, then the browser starts to open a new window. I’m not sure whether the user accidentally activated some interface element, or whether something went wrong on the device (which we should gracefully ascribe to the pre-production software).