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The main feature added in the 2.00 firmware is of course the Internet browser which is HTML 4.01 compliant which means it can handle a lot of the advanced pages on the web. It doesn't have support for Flash though, which in my oppinion is perfectly fine, as it is mostly used for ads and bad games and hardly ever for any important content.
Read on for the review of the PSP web browser.
Rendering of pages are perfect, I've tried graphics and html table heavy pages as well as pages with layout completely done in CSS and there are no problems at all. The text looks good and is easy to read, it's even antialiased to make the edges smoother, the only problem is that not many pages fit into the small screen of the PSP so there is often a need to scroll around in all directions. Navigation is mainly done with a pointer controlled by the ananlog thumb nub, but it's also possible to jump between links with the directional buttons, which also scrolls the page automatically to show the active link. The shoulder buttons are used as Back and Forward history navigation, the Triangle brings up an option menu and location bar, the Square button changes the behavior of the directional buttons and analag stick to scroll around the page and the shoulder buttons switch between page tabs. The Circle and X buttons are used as OK and Cancel, to click on links etc. The option menu has all of the standard browser toolbar options, such as history navigation, refresh, home, bookmarks and history list. It also has some simple settings (such as Home Page, Proxy, Cookie and Cache), a View option to change text size, text encoding and the Display Mode. With the Display Mode it's possible to change the rendering of pages so that they are forced to fit the width of the PSP screen, unfortunately, this doesn't work well on all pages. Finally there's a File option where it's possible to Save Link Target, Open Link in Different Tab, display some extra information and enter a new location. A nice feature for the text entry function is that common parts of domain names have been added so that there's no need to spell out "www." or ".com". Unfortunately this is about the only change the text entry function has, so it's still quite a pain to enter text. One small problem I've found is that there is a problem with rendering international characters, as there is a bit of extra space in front of those characters whenever they show up. This is a bit annoying, but the text is fully readable anyway so it's not that big of a deal. All in all, the browser is very usable and would be more so if there was a better way to enter text for the PSP. |