Exploring Android – Part 2 – Browsing and E-Mail

After giving you an intro of what I'm after in this series in part 1, let's get to the details. There are two main applications I need on my mobile phone:

Web Browser

First, I need a browser that is both fast and resource efficient as I travel a lot and roaming charges, especially oversees, are an ongoing issue. On Symbian, I have used Opera Mini for many years now as it's an excellent browser and uses a compression server that minimizes the amount of data transferred. Luckily, it's available on Android as well and works identical to the Symbian version.

I've also tried out Opera Mini Android / Symbian side by side while traveling on the train to see if there are differences between the two versions when the connection is constantly switched between GSM and UMTS and if there is a difference recovering from network outages. I pretty much got the same stable behavior on both the N8 and the Galaxy S. So that fixes web access.

E-Mail

The second most important mobile application for me is e-mail. Needless to say that I have special requirements here, too. Especially for roaming I need an email application that only downloads the first couple of kilobytes of the email. For reasons explained in part 1, gmail is out of the question and the default SMTP/POP/IMAP email client alternative doesn't seem to support my download limit requirement. But fortunately there are two alternatives. The first is the independently developed K-9 email program with lots of flexibility. And the second is Profimail, an email program I have been using for years on Symbian. Being ultra configurable, the Android version behaves and looks just like the Symbian original. As Profimail supports configuration export and import, I was up and running on Android in a few seconds by forwarding the configuration including all email settings via Bluetooth. I tested the program over several days and it worked very well. The only thing I am missing is a pulsating indicator light that shows me that new messages have arrived when the screen is switched off.