Fennec is Mozilla’s mobile device browser. They have been working on it for some time. Last time I looked at Fennec on the VAIO UX, it was in beta 1. They’ve moved on to beta 3 now and I gave it a quick test on the Viliv S7:
If you’d like to give Fennec a try on your own device, you can download beta 3 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows Mobile, and Maemo (the WM version is still in Alpha 3).
New article: Testing Fennec beta 3 on the Viliv S7 [video] http://cli.gs/qrq4h
Testing Fennec beta 3 on the Viliv S7 [video] http://bit.ly/3jd03Z
Ben,
Pardon my ignorance but if the Viliv 7 is running XP, why Fennec and not the full version which will have Flash. Just wondering what the Fennec advantage would be over Firefox in this situation?
Since the S7’s screen can be flipped around and used as a slate, it would be nice to have a touch oriented browser like Fennec because full Firefox is obviously meant to be controlled with a mouse and keyboard. I’m not replacing Firefox with Fennec on the S7, was just seeing how Fennec was making progress since the earlier betas, and how it worked with a touchscreen. I use Firefox with the Grab and Drag addon as the main browser on the S7, though I actually really wish that someone would make and addon that gave Firefox the side-of-page tab manager, which is really easy to use with a finger.
Does the viliv s7 get hot? I have heard it does due to there being no fan.
Hot is definitely a relative term. I just let it play an episode of The Office on Hulu (streaming over Wifi, and using a Flash player), and I would say that it is only warm. Definitely hasn’t gotten nearly as hot as my HP tablet.
Testing Fennec beta 3 on the Viliv S7 [video] http://tinyurl.com/yk2ea72 [umpcportal]
RT @benz145: New article: Testing Fennec beta 3 on the Viliv S7 [video] http://cli.gs/qrq4h (via @johnnybrasco)
I really, really don’t like Fennec.
Say I’m reading something on the far right side of the screen, I need to scroll all the way to the left to bring up the left menu, as opposed to having a small button that reveals menus down on the bottom right?
Or how about when you’ve double-tapped to zoom in – how do the sidebars and the page behave then when you scroll left or right? How should they behave?
Ben,
I would like to use the viliv s7 as a digital note taker in meeting as it has a superb form factor and long battery life. Out of the factory can it currently work with one note, inkseine or any other 3rd party app for digital inking and will/does fennec help in this regard.?, if not what needs to be done to allow this attribute ?
Thanks, Djsell
Yes it shouldn’t have any issue running the applications that you listed, provided that they work with Windows XP, however, the S7 uses a resistive touchscreen without an active digitizer. This means that it is much less than optimal for handwriting. If you are looking to take hand written notes, I would recommend looking at a full tablet PC with an active digitizer, which vastly improves the handwriting experience. I have a tablet PC and use Evernote to take Ink Notes, I would NOT want to use a computer without an active digitizer for written notes.
well, swaying away from fennec a bit,..i believe the win mobile platform works with resistive touch screens (pls correct me if nec here) and when i used those for digital ink they worked just fine, now i mean just leaving in dig ink as notes with 3rd party apps, not with handwriting recog,…the 1 pos attribute , of only a few, i see with the viliv s7’s large screen bezel would be using it in portrait mode in slate form to write digitally and the bezel would then seem to allow for resting of the palm/wrist on it to avoid touching the screen and to allow for grabbing the device w/o touching the acreen as i do with my small bezeled archos 7…….have you, or anybody tried using the viliv s7 in these situations ??…i know i should post in the reg forums, but…..
djsell
Any suggestions on active digitiser tablets?
dave,
for what its worth….
i still use my hp tc 1100 10″ convertible that has win xp tablet and works great as a slate when sep from the kb…my prob is its still a little too heavy to lug around and battery life is 2-3 hrs only, but i have 2 extra batteries…you can find on ebay for 2-300 usd….still a great product….i incr ram to 1.5 gb and hdd to 100, so it works well,..i just want a smaller and lighter device with touch capabilities…djsell
Ben,
In another Forum post you talked about a folding keyboard and BT mouse to be used with a 9 inch device for mobile blogging. May I ask why this Viliv 7 would not meet your mobile blogging needs? Is it the keyboard? Screen? Your the only one I know with access to the 7 and clearly it is not a final solution for your mobile computing needs. Your observations would be instructive.
Actually, the S7 could pretty easily replace that setup that I had listed. The S7 is pretty thin, light, and has GREAT battery life so far from my testing.
Hey ben good nes just recieved my viliv s7. Are there any good touch screen programs that you would recommend for the s7 mainly because of the flip feature. thanks
None that come off the top of my head yanni, except for the great Grab and Drag Firefox addon. You could always give this simple launcher a try that I had developed a while back! (never made it out of beta : P) http://www.micropctalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2710
I installed One Note 2003 on my Viliv and it’s horrible – the touch screen seems “slow” like it’s a few seconds behind where my pen is and I end up with many missing lines – you have to write extremely slowly for it to be able to keep up.
I can’t imagine that this is the touchscreen’s fault, though – it may just be the drivers. I’d be interested to see how it behaves on Windows 7 – but I’m not quite ready for that yet – since the SSD is so small (I have the 16 gb version) I’m wary of running out of space. Also I’m not sure how to implement the video playback via the graphics card that works in XP. I play a lot of MKV files, and from experimenting on my laptop which I have 7 32 bit running on, it didn’t play MKV without 3rd party codecs, and those don’t use graphics card acceleration at all except for the CoreAVC codec, which only accelerates on NVidia cards, and costs $15.
I ve installed a newer version and the scrolling is better (no white and grey squares) – nice basic browser to use in touch mode on my S7 – Thanks for the review !
oops I’ve talked too fast, in some cases (just after loading a page for example) the white & grey squares still appear …
a couple of shortcuts : http://forum.pocketables.net/showthread.php?t=4501