vB Easy Archive - ic902 and Opera 4 mini beta 2 - kludge method to get it to work!

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ic902 and Opera 4 mini beta 2 - kludge method to get it to work!
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Posted by: Sprintina

After white-screening with the hi-res ("advanced") versions of Opera 3 mini and Opera 4 mini beta 1 (the "basic"/"lo-res" Opera 3 mini works fine), I saw a post on the Opera forum from an i875 user who recommended restarting the phone after doing an initial install. So I tried that and had success with actually getting the latest - Opera 4 mini beta 2 (hi-res)- up and running on my ic902 - at least that very first time after installing. As a side note - I am still at ver. 2.61 of the firmware on my ic902 (haven't moved to 2.62 yet so YMMV here if it has anything to do with this).

There is a catch though, as I tried to find a somewhat consistent way to get it started again later without getting a white screen - After trying a number of things, I noticed that it appears that one problem seems to revolve around whether the hi-res browser can actually establish a successful connection or not when it is first starting up. It's as if there's little or no wait/retry time built-in to have the browser app try to get a connection established without locking up rather than at least gracefully timing out with an error that allows you to retry or exit (i.e., it seems to be trying to connect "behind the white screen" but then locks up immediately if it can't get connected right away).

Anyway - The below is what I did to finally see what everyone was raving about:

1.) Browsed to the Opera 4 mini beta site (beta 2 was available) with the default browser and proceeded with the download (the site doesn't recognize the phone so it would basically select the generic version for download).

(point phone browser to mini.opera.com/beta )

2.) After downloading and once it gets to the point of asking whether to "Run" or "Shop", I just hit the red button to kill the default browser and then powered the phone off.

3.) Powered the phone back up and then looked for the Opera 4 mini beta in the apps, selected it to run, and let it go through the rest of its install/configure procedure (which includes its setting of the network permission options, etc).

4.) After it gets to the EULA and you accept it, it starts up just fine, landing on the default Yahoo Search start page. From there, you can go to your web sites in hi-res.

5.) When done, exit the app and POWER-CYCLE the phone.

And of course the catch - if you exit and try to get back into it later without powering off and back on again and having some established connection before starting it up - white screen.

I first thought I should change something in the browser's settings and save but that didn't seem to make a difference (I even changed the "network" setting from "socket" to "http" but that didn't do it).

After going through a lot of experimentation, I noticed that this hi-res version of Opera seems to be sensitive to the state of the network that the phone is in when it is starting up. I am in an EVDO area but often watch the phone use either speed depending on where it's pointing. This doesn't seem to impact the text browsers from what I can tell. But for some reason, if the Opera hi-res version can't instantly "lock in" to some "operational" network pipe at start up, it white-screens. Whatever it does during the first install/configure seems to be more robust in that case but that doesn't carry over to the regular start up. It's like I have to piggy-back it on an established connection, and basically that may be what is happening when it is first installing via a different browser.

What I found to be most consistent to do (at least so far) was to start up some other browser (the phone's default one works for this), let that browser connect and transfer some data, then exit it, and start up the Opera 4 mini beta 2, and that seems to do the trick without getting a white screen most times. HOWEVER - the caveat is that once I was done with the beta and exited it normally, then I HAD to power-cycle the phone and that seemed to almost guarantee that I could bring up the beta ~90% of the time later on (after going through the previous steps of getting that network connection established through a different browser). Once it's up and browsing and the network connection waivers, it does like it should - it retries for x amount of seconds before notifying of the lost connection and whether to retry.

In any case, when it is working, some of the new features in the beta 2 like landscape mode, DO work on this phone (at least for the couple sites I tried).

There's also a little mouse pointer that you can move around with the arrow keys and it switches to a finger when on a link or over a text box. You can display the full web page, although the page text and graphics are obviously minuscule...

But this view was cool as all get out and you can zoom in to a section by positioning and clicking on the zoom box with the mouse. One of the default bookmarks is the NY Times website and that gives you a good look at the full page mode feature. I have only been to a couple sites so far and haven't even attempted to do anything other than scroll around and zoom in or out but at least I got this far. There is a settings option to change a bunch of things including whether to have it display full width, or display with higher resolution graphics, or change the font size (default is "medium" and you can also choose "small", "large" or "extra large"), or have it use a 24 hour or 12 hour clock, clear cookies, etc.

I think those of us with this phone always felt that the hi-res version SHOULD work on it given the phone's specs and I finally found that it can work after doing the kludgy type stuff that I indicate above. Hopefully as they fix the bugs, it will start up and work as well as the basic version on the hybrid phones.

Posted by: ecr

I also have been using beta 2 on my ic902; i didn't do any of what you described (i installed it normally), but i have found that it seems to make a difference if you exit the program through the exit command in the opera mini's menu- basically if you use the program's exit command [rather than hitting the end (hang up) key twice (or hang up key once and then the phone's exit option)], it seems to restart fine afterwards about 95 percent of the time. If i do get the white screen, i hit the end button many times (with flip open and closed ) until i eventually get back to the phone's main screen, and then i do a power cycle and it then works fine.

one more thing- sometimes when the program loads, it looks fine but the start page seems to be frozen- i just hit the red (hang up) key once, and when it asks if i want to exit or resume, i hit resume- this unfreezes it every time.

the software on my phone is 2.62

Posted by: Sprintina

Quote:

Originally Posted by ecr

I also have been using beta 2 on my ic902; i didn't do any of what you described (i installed it normally), but i have found that it seems to make a difference if you exit the program through the exit command in the opera mini's menu- basically if you use the program's exit command [rather than hitting the end (hang up) key twice (or hang up key once and then the phone's exit option)], it seems to restart fine afterwards about 95 percent of the time. If i do get the white screen, i hit the end button many times (with flip open and closed ) until i eventually get back to the phone's main screen, and then i do a power cycle and it then works fine.

one more thing- sometimes when the program loads, it looks fine but the start page seems to be frozen- i just hit the red (hang up) key once, and when it asks if i want to exit or resume, i hit resume- this unfreezes it every time.

the software on my phone is 2.62

When I was testing various ways to get it working, I did stumble upon some of the things you mention including the freeze of the start page (where the app hadn't completely locked up the phone yet and allowed use of the red button to do a resume). I have been using the program's "exit" as well, to quit.

I had earlier installed beta 1 (hi-res) and deleted it after getting the white screen when trying to start it after download and install and had tried the ver. 3 hi-res with a similar result. At that time, I ended up settling for ver. 3 lo-res which worked with no problem. But now it's great to finally be able to get a hi-res version going as the previous recommendations here and at other forums (e.g., SprintUsers and Opera) indicated that only the lo-res version was working on this phone. Someone had reported the problem with the beta 1 to the developers (not sure if they had submitted a bug report as the developers recommended), and there was speculation by the developers that it should work (due to the phone having the required MIDP 2) and they could try tweaking the code to handle this phone.

This latest beta is cool though and I hope others will try getting it installed and running!