Thoughts On Nokia 7610 Web Browsing

One thing that is really annoying me at present, is Nokia not shipping a decent browser on the 7610 phone. I've found the built in web browser usable, but it does have it's limitations.

It doesn't support file upload for starters. This would be a brilliant feature to have on available on the phone. All the photos I take currently have to be downloaded to my PC, or sent via the phones email software to be used. Just think file upload was there. It would be trivial to build web based applications to upload photos to sites and use them. I guess Nokia want to make sure this is limited to ensure a market for their Lifeblog product, which allows photos to be uploaded via (what appears to be) an Atom interface. However, Lifeblog is a commercial product, and I don't really want to pay extra for what I would have thought was standard functionality for a phone of this type.

Opera For Mobile would appear to offer a superior solution for web browsing on the 7610. It supports all current sites out of the box, re-rendering them if necessary to fit the screen on the phone. It also allows itself to be used and launched by third party software. The sore point here is that you only get a 14 day free trial before you have to buy it, and it's really expensive. Opera do offer bulk purchase deals, and it would have been nice for Nokia or Orange (my network provider) to have supplied this with the phone. For individual purchases, the cost is just too high, and I can't justify it with my current usage levels. If I bought it I may find my usage levels (and data bill) increasing, and justifying the purchase price, but not at present. At a time when mobile networks are trying to increase their data revenues, surely providing good connectivity software to users would help them claw back any bulk purchase cost in profit from the increased data traffic. It's also a shame that Opera can't create an free version, maybe supported by ads. People are more inclined to spend on their phone, so the right ads could well subsidise the cost of giving it away for nothing.

I had installed Opera when I first got my 7610 a few months ago, but never really used it. This was a mistake as when I really want to evaluate it, I find my trial time has run out. As I didn't have anything saved for it, I tried removing it and reinstalling it. The software is clever enough to know it's been installed before, and won't let me have another trial period. I don't think Series 60 Symbian phones have the equivalent of the Registry in Windows, so it must be putting a file somewhere. I would assume this would be on the C drive, and not on the MMC drive. I've had a delve around with FExplorer and found an Opera folder in the images directory. I deleted it, but it hasn't made a difference. Does anyone know how this works, or how to reset the trial period? I really want to give Opera a serious try, and I don't want to have to buy it full price (yet) or get another phone to do so.