Asus Eee Pad Transformer

These days I'm testing an Asus Transformer (the first version, not the new "Prime") in order to check the viability to use it as a kiosk display.

Currently it's much simpler and cheaper to provide the clients or visitors a touch screen so they can query information or perform some basic tasks thanks to all these new tablets, but the fact is that it could be even cheaper and more powerful. I'll write a separate post about that with all the things that I have in my mind.

I'm gonna try to focus this little review on the things that I've found so far, at least as a serie of notes to myself so I can remember these details some months from now.

The client wanted basically a touch screen that could be used to access a single site by the customers so things like GPS, bluetooth or the cameras didn't really matter, but it's usualy better to get a brand name instead of an unknown mix  of components that you can't be sure if they will survive 6 months and the quality of those components. And of course, having such a table available means that they could take it home at night and use it for other means if they want to :-)

I've also thought about buying one such tablet for myself, and I was unsure about how I might use it instead of my Nexus One (N1), so this is a good way to test it.

First impressions

I was expecting/hoping for something lighter. I don't mean in any way that it's heavy; not at all, but for myself I was hoping to get a very light tablet and this one doesn't fit that expectation. I wanted something as light as my phone but with a bigger screen, hey, we're free to have high hopes for the future :-) maybe a 7" tablet might be better for my expectations in this regard.

It has a relatively wide bevel around the screen, in a way it can prevent that grabbing the borders will activate the touch sensors like happens in the N1, but I think that other smart touch controlers don't have the same problems as the one in the N1 and even then I bet that you can cut that border in half and still keep always the fingers out of the screen.

It uses a propietary connector instead of mini or micro USB, I don't like that; we all know that in such situations the outcome is that if for whatever reason the cable gets damaged or lost I have to buy it from them instead of being able to use any other one that I have available at home. Other simple reason is that the cable itself it isn't very large so if I connect it to the computer I can't move too much the tablet because it's almost at the full length of the cable.

It seems that trying to charge it by connecting it to a computer it's too slow according to other reviews. I've just connected it to check that but I can't be sure if it's charging or not, I don't see any indication like it happens in the N1 where an orange LED signals that it's charging and when it turns green then it's over 80%. But here there's no feedback about the charging, the only way to know that it has been charging is to wait a while and then look at the battery stats to verify that they have gone up.

I can understand that a power outlet is a better energy source than the USB connector of a computer, but if I buy a tablet I would expect to be able to connect it with a standard USB cable to a computer and then get it to charge at a reasonable speed instead of being forced to carry that special connector and wall plug.

Currently I can't use the tablet because it's charging from the wall and as I said the cable isn't very long so I would have to stay in an awkward position in order to use it while charging. BTW: when charging from the power outlet the Lock screen stated that it was charging, but after the screen goes off there's no LED, the only way to know if it has finished charging is to wake it up and look at the text in the lock screen.

Shortly after booting it up and connecting it to the wifi it downloaded two firmare updates automatically and the next day I performed a check while looking at the settings and another one was ready to install. I think that according to other comments Asus seems to be providing constant updates and that's a very good thing for me as a consumer, I don't want to buy anything from a company that sells a product and the only update that they offer is to spend the money with their new device. If I buy something I expect it to work and being supported for a very long time, I don't like that programmed obsolescence situation created by the big corporations to keep us buying new things.

Back to updates, the Market app notified that there were 4 updates available, although they show the Install button insted of update. I've managed to install/update one of those apps, the other three just open the existing app instead of installing a new version. One of those apps is Google Maps, it has the version 5.10.1 and the latest found with the N1 is 6.0.3. No matter how many times I click on the install button, it always open the current one instead of trying to upgrade it.

Talking about maps, it's quite broken in this version: while using only the maps view it seems to work fine, but after adding the satellite layer it hangs up in a very short time, the map gets frozen and although the buttons seem to accept clicks, there's no dialog, dropdown or anything. The only solution at that moment is to go to the Applications settings and kill the Google Maps process. But the funny thing is that once I launched the maps while in Airplane mode and then I was able to use the satellite view with the cached photos perfectly, zooming in and out, moving, rotating, ... really nice but it's not practical to go into airplane mode in order to use the app :-D

The YouTube application doesn't show the subtitles, although it's able to dim the controls (and clock) in the notification bar so they are a single gray dot . So far I've found that only the Gallery is able to perform this same trick, so using other video players not optimized for HoneyComb might be a little annoying with thosee controls always visible while trying to watch a movie.

The Browser uses the following User Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 3.2.1; es-es; Transformer TF101 Build/HTK75) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/534.13

It looks more like a Chrome thanks to the full url bar with tabs, and the first thing that it prompted upon launch was to install the Flash Player from the market (I didn't because I don't need it for this project), besides tabs, the browser also supports incognito mode.

contentEditable and CKEditor

I performed a quick test and looked OK, so I used my local copy of CKEditor these are my tests (the tablet is running Android 3.2.1 HoneyComb, the browser doesn't seem to be a version modified by Asus but I can't be sure about that), you can use the official CKEditor demo as well:

The keyboard pops up automatically and the blinking caret is visible. It's easy to write (using always the virtual keyboard, I'm using the default Asus keyboard for these tests), but it's hard to move the caret exactly, there are no cursor keys and you have to rely on touching with your finger in the right point.  When I tested in the simple contentEditable test, each time I pressed Enter the keyboard went away, but in CKEditor this doesn't happen, I guess that this is an unexpected benefit of the enter key handler in CKEditor. Another difference is that in the basic test the browser follows the link but in the full CKEditor nothing happens, so I wonder what can be going on here.

It's possible to perform a long press and select the text in the content as well as copy it, but the text can't be pasted back in the document directly. If I press the "Paste as Text" then I can use the dialog to paste in that textarea and insert it back in the document (but of course as plain text). So: No pasting in contentEditable.

Those selection handles don't seem to really work at the DOM level, if I try to select some text and then apply any formatting then nothing changes: the handles go away and the text remain in its previous formatting. It's not possible to format existing content. The problem seems to be that those handles are overlayed on the document, but they don't modify the DOM selection: It's possible to select all the contents with the "Select All" command and the selected text gets a green background, then performing a long touch shows the selection handles that allow to perform a new selection over the existing content that it's already selected. Then clicking the Bold button the first time makes the handles disappear and the second one made all the contents bold as the previous "Select all" was still in effect.

Clicking a format button like bold and then typing works correctly, the text uses the format so it can be used to format new content; but of course you have to be careful to click/touch the right button, the current toolbar isn't designed for a touch screen.

Dialogs can't be dragged around (like iOS), of course the dialogs can't be resized and the tableresize plugin doesn't work. When all those elements are fixed to handle touch events for iOS they should also work in Android. Another point in common is the lack of context menus, this is all part of adjusting the UI of CKEditor to make it touch friendly. Trying to use the divreplace sample also fails, the sample might need to use the proper listener instead of the current doubleclick as that just zooms in-out

The maximize button makes the toolbar disappear making this a very dangerous button.

Some differences with the iOS tickets: I didn't notice any problem typing after enabling SCAYT, the editor doesn't grow, it remains at the initial size,  overflow auto seems to work, it's possible to scroll the contents of the editor as well as the toolbar combos

The toolbar combos can be closed , but they don't work perfectly; selecting an option from font size or family works, but it also performs a click on the point where you touch the screen to select the option, so usually the caret moves and you don't get the expected result. The Styles combo is much more buggier, although the contents scroll but dragging them, it seems that somehow the clicks always go to the first items, I always ended with "var" and "kbd" instead of any other style further down.

When a dialog is opened, it puts the caret in the first field, but the keyboard disappears and you have to touch that input to show again the keyboard.

When typing at the end of the editor and pressing enter the caret jumps to the next line, but the content doesn't scroll up automatically so you can't see what you're typing, and when I tried to write something long, it scrolled the first line, but it didn't scroll again after that. When I tested the Google Voice keyboard to talk instead of typing it only inserted the first letter of my sentences.

Using the editor with the default sample pages isn't nice because the editor is placed almost at the bottom of the screen, when you touch the content the keyboard pops up over the current content so you have to scroll now that up (previously it wasn't possible) to see the caret. and whenever the keyboard goes away the document is scrolled back to its original position and a loop begins of keyboard on, scroll manually, keyboard off, auto scroll. And when a dialog opens up you might not be able to use it correctly in landscape mode because the dialog is centered on the screen, it's not possible to scroll it and the keyboard is covering most of the dialog

CKFinder doesn't recognize the browser as a mobile device so it doesn't show automatically the little adjustments introduced in 2.1 and that means that it's not possible to insert images or links to files.

Too many permissions for simple apps

Yesterday I was badly surprised when Reto Meier added a post pointing to an Android game activated by the voice; that sounded fun (although it's clear that it can't be played in too many places), but I wanted to check it out.

The bad surprise came when the market showed me the required permissions for the App:

• Record sound (obviously, it needs as that's the differential point)
• Full internet access (ok, some ads as it's a free app)
• Read and write the contents of the SD card. This isn't too nice, but some apps and games have extra downloads to keep the app itself smaller and they download the data to the SD. We have to accept it until Android provides a better option (check below for my proposal)
• Read identity and state of my phone. No, this isn't OK. An app doesn't really require to know anything about my phone. Usually this is enough for me to not install an app.
• Read SMS. What??? Read my SMS? for a game?, are you joking?. So this app requires full internet access, read all the content of my SD card as well as my identity and my SMS? They can ask for my bank account at the same time.
• Send SMS. Ok, this is enough. What's the difference between this game and those trojans that have been found claiming to be legit Android Apps? How can a user be able to find out that the developer is really a good person and it's requiring those permissions really based on real requirements instead of being used to send premium SMSs and hide them as those trojans do?

Whenever such application with those huge permissions is mentioned by someone that it's otherwise respected, we can expect that people will download it, and by doing it people will be used to accept that apps might require extra permissions. This will lead to "permission blindness" just like people is now blind to the Ads that appear in some webs, people will get used very soon to the fact that any app might want to read your SMS, your contacts and anything else.

So this will destroy any effectivenes of the permissions system, the typical statement "be careful about what you install" and "it's easy to spot a trojan due to its permissions" will be void. Sum it with the lack of review system in the Android Market and you get a big problem just waiting to happen.

According to some comments in that post, the developers answered in Twitter claiming that the SMS is to upgrade the app to a paid version. So... what's wrong with the Android Market? why don't you offer the full version there instead of using SMSs? Does premium SMS work across countries? how much it's gonna cost some random user in Spain like me a premium SMS sent to the USA? If it's just an internal switch in the app, why isn't this done using the existing internet connection? People pay it in your site and then the app is upgraded to full version. Hell, it can even be done showing the user an unlock code and without internet on the phone app itself!

The requirement to read/write the SD card could be fixed if Android had a better system for apps to store their own data:
Currently those apps create random folders anywhere on the SD card and they remain there after the app has been removed. If instead of getting full access to the SD card they had access to just a custom unique folder, then this could be much better:

1. Any app can read/write to his own folder in the SD, ex. /Android/data/com.google.android.apps.maps/
2. That folder is only accessed by that app (or other apps like file managers that really request full SD access), there's no need to state it in the permission list
3. When the app is removed, the uninstaller also cleans up that folder, so that the app has been really uninstalled and nothing remains. If the user wanted to keep the data he can do a backup of the folder before performing the removal.
4. In summary: the app itself doesn't really need to know the location of that folder, it just knows that it can safely read and write there, and due to that safety it doesn't require an extra permission at install time. Better for the developer, better for the users.

The Android system really needs an improvement in the way that permissions are granted, the user shouldn't have to worry because an app is requesting weird permissions, also, the Android Market should be much more careful and force a review of any app that requires permissions like send SMS, or perform a combination of read SD and get internet access. When an app just requires internet to show ads it's OK, but if that app is also able to read all the data in your SD card (photos, Titanium backups, etc...) then it should be reviewed to provide a warranty that it's a good app and not something evil.

Enough of bad comments, do you want to know a nice game? (no, this post isn't sponsored and I'm not related to the developer)
Test Trap!, it ask for all the permissions that you can expect from a nice game: none, and it can keep you playing it for a while trying to beat yourself.

 

Testing Google's Music Beta

Last week I got the invitation to the new Google's "Music Beta" service. I haven't had time to test it too much, but these are my first impressions:

1. Upload is really slow. That's of course due to my ADSL connection, but you can expect almost a week to upload all your music.
2. It's strange that the limit is the number of songs (20.000) instead of the size of them
3. The Uploader recognizes that .ogg files are music, but it refuses to upload them. Why? I've to verify if it has uploaded other "strange" formats that Foobar2000 played happily.
4. I didn't had all the music properly tagged with ID3 as it was organized with folders and it worked fine, but now those files have crypting names. That's bad in a thousand files library. But the problem is that I have to find out which files have been uploaded wrong, then correct my local copies and also correct the remote copies (or reupload them).
5. If I edit the metadata of some remote file, I can't download later that updated file. That means that we can't really get rid of our local copies and use just the cloud for storage. In no way I'm gonna get rid of my MP3 player until the phone's batteries last as much and the only way to put music there is with USB, no magic cloud connection.
6. Some albums are missing the cover picture, and you can edit that with the web interface, but they have forgotten to add drag&drop support to easily upload the new picture. Hey Google, ask the GMail team to give you a hand.
7. I don't see how playing streaming music in a browser can be interesting in my desktop, I won't use Google Music there until they provide a native application that can use my existing files without streaming them (Hey, I already have them here)
8. The uploader has given me an interesting error with some files: "No music found in file", but every other player handles those files correctly. Editing the tags didn't fix, so I reencoded and then it accepted them and they were uploaded.
9. Other times it has stated that there's an error while uploading, so I have to verify album by album if it has been correctly uploaded.

 

Little test of Firefox 4 beta 3 for mobile

As Mozilla has just released Firefox 4 beta for mobile, and due to a talk this morning with Garry about editing in mobile I wanted to check how does it rate just in a quick test of contentEditable vs the default webkit-based browser.

The basic test at the previous post is enough for the initial checks and it doesn't require anything special, anyone can easily test if his browser includes the basic functionality expected in a modern browser.

Here's a testing area again:

Type here.., a link (it's part of the content, so it shouldn't be active)

First test: I click on the div and a caret shows up. Firefox 1, Webkit 0 (nothing signals that the editable zone has focus)

Second test: scrolling with the trackball moves the caret. Firefox 2, Webkit 0 (it scrolls the screen)

Third one: clicking on the link doesn't tries to open it. Firefox 3, Webkit 0 (it opens the linked Google page)

Fourth: The keyboard opens automatically when the div is focused. Firefox 4, Webkit 0 (You must open it by long pressing the Menu key)

Fifth: Typing (default keyboard) is slooow, very very slow. Firefox 4, Webkit 1 (in this page it works as fast as any other input field)

Sixth: Typing with Swiftkey, it tries to edit the contents, it's almost impossible to use it. 8pen seems to behave a little better. It seems that the Android browser tells the keyboard to send only single characters or to ignore autocomplete, I don't know how to explain it, but for this situation I think that using the Webkit method works better. Firefox 4, Webkit 2

Seventh: tweaking the CKEditor env.js file to allow the Android browser, we can test it in the full environment. The context menu opens/remains open at the 0x0 of the content, trying to type anything is almost impossible, the editor gets the focus, the keyboard opens and then it's closed automatically. Firefox 4, Webkit 3. The context menu doesn't show up and once the keyboard is forced it remains there. This could be something that can be tweaked in CKEditor, as the simple test doesn't behaves so badly.

Conclusion:

None of them are usable :-(

Maybe Firefox could be much better if it was able to select/configure the way that the keyboard opens, and then we should try to understand why it behaves that way in the full editor. Besides that, Firefox is still missing other features (the zoom function seems much worse than webkit) so we just need to be sure to fill a ticket with Firefox so they might fix it in the future.

Edit 1: I've filed bug 621438 for the Firefox problems with the keyboard.

Final UA for FroYo FRF91

There are no surprises in the User-Agent for the "final" build of Android 2.2 for the Nexus One

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; es-es; Nexus One Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

Again, the only change is the build identifier. I tested just in case the demo for contentEditable and it has the same problems, it's almost impossible to use. Even the trackball isn't recognized as a way to move the caret (that is invisible btw).

Does Android 2.2 support contentEditable?

In Android 2.1 the browser doesn't support the contentEditable attribute for elements, meaning that it's not possible to use WYSIWYG editors in web pages because the virtual keyboard won't popup to write your texts (lots of other operations can be done by manipulating the DOM, but also providing a virtual keyboard might be too much).

One important problem with that status is that although contentEditable doesn't work, isContentEditable does return the "correct" value, and it states that such elements are editable although they aren't so it can't be used to find out if the browser doesn't support contentEditable and when they release a new version enable it automatically.

So I filed a ticket about this some weeks ago, and yesterday I got a notification stating that Android 2.2 a.k.a. FroYo does support contentEditable!

Those are good news, really good news. If it's true, you can expect to see support for your Android phone shortly in editors like CKEditor, TinyMCE, YahooUI,... and apps like GMail, Google Docs....

Anyway, I'm still unsure about that statement, currently I'm using FRF83, that's not the final build because now I'm waiting for the OTA as they said that we should get it during this week, but I've been doing quick tests with the previous builds and I didn't notice any change in the behavior.

You can test it right below. If it works, clicking after the "type here" paragraph should put the caret there and enable the keyboard, and clicking the link should not open the Google home page, let me know if it works in your phone.

Type here.., a link (it's part of the content, so it shouldn't be active)

Updated UA of Froyo FRF72

The User Agent in the new leaked FRF72 build is

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; es-es; Nexus One Build/FRF72) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

Compared to the previous one, the only change is the build identifier. No change to the WebKit version.

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; es-es; Nexus One Build/FRF50) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

 

Send To Phone is now approved

Today the Send To Phone extension has been approved so installing it should be a little easier and less "frightening", but most important, now it's part of the auto-update so everyone should get the latest version soon.

Well, maybe not everybody because looking at the stats it says that one user has tried to install it in Thunderbird, and someone else is running Firefox 2.0, so I guess that he might have disabled automatic updates (but then why does he wants an extension that requires you to be on the bleeding edge using a pre-release OS in your phone?)

Since the initial release the extension has got some little adjustments:

• First the localizations, now they are partly done so if you have an update for your language send it to us.
• Then the context menu was improved to allow better control over sending links or images.
• After that a little adjustment to try to send the current view while navigating the maps instead of just the Google Maps url
• And the last one before approval was a context menu on the toolbar to allow to logout (it just clears the cookie), so you can switch accounts.

Lots of people are downloading the extension and they are happy about it. It's not a revolution about how to use your mobile, but I've found it useful to quickly send to the phone a url or video that I wanted to watch as I move away from the computer.

The next things that might get added is support for more apps (Seamonkey, Thunderbird) and a more controlled login experience (use our own dialog instead of showing the default login in a new tab). Drop here a note if you have a nice idea, but remember that this is only the part for your browser, the Android App is the one provided by Chrome to Phone project.

Debugging web pages in Android

Finally I've found a nicer way to debug errors with web pages in the Nexus One!

The Android documentation states that console.log calls can be used to send messages to "logcat", and then you need another app or keep the phone connected to the computer with the SDK and whatever in order to read those messages. Too complex.

On the other hand, if you type "about:debug" in the url bar and press go, you won't notice anything special, but if you press the menu button and then "More", you'll notice that there are two extra items at the end, also there are additional settings at the end of the panel (allowing to change the User-Agent for example). And one of them (enabled by default) is to show the javascript console, so now when a page outputs something to the Javascript console you get a little notification bar at the top and clicking it shows the messages without the need to switch to another application.

I don't know where this feature is described and other about: pages that have special meaning in Android.

Little Firefox extension for people with Android 2.2

One of the new features that it's coming in Android 2.2 or FroYo is the ability to use the Google "Cloud to Device" servers. Basically it is the possibility of an Android App to get a notification from an external server, but without the need to open a connection by yourself and drain the battery and data plan of the user. It's nicely explained in the Android Developers blog: Android Cloud to Device Messaging

Besides the API they have published also a little project "Chrome to Phone" that adds a little button in your chrome browser to send whatever page you are currently viewing to your phone. But despite all the nice features of Chrome I still prefer to use Firefox, the Chrome interface still looks too weird to me and in general I know that I Firefox works mostly the way that I want.

So the next step was quite obvious: it was a Sunday with some free time so I created the Send to Phone extension. It was funny but quickly after publishing it I realized that another guy had the same idea and he beat me by 3 minutes, fortunately it seems that none of us have a big ego so we have agreed to merge both extensions, I picked some of his code, added a few extra things and we got now a nicer version for you to enjoy.

If you did install the leaked 2.2 preview you can test the extension right now, I hope that you enjoy it and find it useful at least for some situations: for example this morning I started watching a YouTube video on the PC, but had to go to the kitchen, so I just clicked the button and then I had the same video on the phone without the need to search anything.

Browser updates in FroYo

As FroYo (Android 2.2) has been "released" for the Nexus One I opted to not wait for the OTA update and yesterday I installed it. The process was very easy and quite fast.

In the Google I/O conference they talked a bit about the new features, and those have been posted over and over again, so I just wanted to talk about the details in the browser.

Previously the User-Agent was

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; es-es; Nexus One Build/ERE27) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

Now it's

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; es-es; Nexus One Build/FRF50) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

The scores at Acid3 and Html5Test remain the same (more about this later)

Animated gifs now work, and also <input type="file">, although its behavior it's a little strange: When you click it it prompts you to select the application to use: Gallery, Sound recorder, Ringdroid and Music track.

Gallery and Music track works as you expect: it shows their listings and you can pick up the file that you want. Sound recorder is also quite what you can expect: you get a simple sound recorder allowing to record, play and confirm the sound, but it doesn't allow to change any setting and the file is saved as .3gpp (AMR 8000Hz 12kbps)  in the root of the SD card. I didn't test for the moment to upload it, but refreshing the page leaves the file there, maybe it would have been better placed at the /tmp ? The other strange issue with this Sound recorder is that such app isn't available as a stand alone, why?

Finally Ringdroid, this means that other apps should be able to somehow appear in the list. When you pick Ringdroid it shows a file listing and when you select one, instead of going back to the browser it opens that file in Ringdroid, so you edit it and it becomes the selected one, but you can't pick an existing file without modification.

So now I hope that whatever API is required to use correctly this feature is properly documented so file managers like Astro are able to hook into it and we can use whatever file that we have on the SD card.

Lastly Flash. Yes, Flash 10.1 (beta) available in a mobile device: You go to the market, search for Adobe and install it. Then you can go to browse the web without any worry about if some feature was using it or no, you just use that page. And if you don't want to use it by default you just have to adjust the settings in the browser so add-ons aren't enabled by default so you see a green arrow and can click it to load that flash. Hey Apple-fans, how does that causes crashes or eat my battery?

As I was testing the html file upload I decided to give the flash part a go and it works partly: if the file mask is *.* then you can't pick any file (a "No file was found" message is shown), but if you restrict it to images ("*.jpg; *.jpeg; *.png") then it will show you a list of images and you can select the one that you want (yes, one one at a time). Isn't that weird? if you say that you only want images you get the file listing, but if you allow any file then you can't pick anyone.

 

Testing Fennec with the Nexus One

As lots of sites have reported, Mozilla has published a first "pre-alpha" build of Fennec for Android. Of course, I had to give it a try with this little gem know as Nexus One  and so I downloaded and installed.

The first impression is that for the moment is still too slow load, doesn't use the bottom buttons, it needs still work, but I think that given the time that they have been working on this the impression is very possitive.

The surprise came when I decided to load CKEditor on it to test if this is again a crippled browser like the stock ones in iPhone and Android, but the surprise is that it works!!!. yes, click on the content and the keyboard pops up and you can change the contents. Selection doesn't work and I haven't tried too many things because the browser itself is lacking for the moment lots of little things, but I guess that this will be the first mobile browser to work with CKEditor and other WYSIWYG editors.

Kudos to all the people that made this possible.

And for iPhone fans: I'm sorry for you, not being able to select the browser to use is a pity. Maybe someday Apple will release a new version of iPhoneOS with a browser that has the same features that their desktop version, meanwhile you'll enjoy only a part of the internet with your mobile.