Outlook Web Access must be one of the key components for a lot of businesses when thinking of the Nokia Internet Tablets. They have no full java support, so remote access via Citrix isn’t an option (as far as I know), no direct syncing ability with outlook so for the vast majority of business users who have outlook as their business email the only option is Outlook Web Access.
I thought I’d give it a spin and write something along the lines of a short review. I should mention I’ve obscured parts of the images for privacy reasons. Right, here we go.
I decided to try both browser engines to see how they compare. To be honest I wasn’t expecting a difference at all really. Here is the MicroB rendering of the Inbox:
As you can see, if you have any folders under your inbox (as I do) then your whole screen can get taken up with displaying those, meaning you don’t see any actual emails. Its a little disappointing that they take so much space in this view. Scrolling down shows you the emails but they all take up a lot of space. In my opinion, theres a lot of blank space thats not required when the inbox is rendered. Also the buttons on the taskbar are kind of all over the place. It looks pretty unorganised.
Next, Writing a new mail:
Again, theres a lot of blank space but other than that it works as you’d expect.
Creating a new meeting request:
Again, no surprises, its functional and you can see pretty much everything in one view.
The Calendar view:
I actually quite like the view you get here, not too much wasted space and its very similar to the full Outlook client.
Those seemed to me to be the most important functions. i checked out contacts, tasks etc but basically you get the idea of how it renders on the n800 in MicroB from those screenshots.
Now, for Opera.The Inbox:
Quite a difference from MicroB to Opera. I have to admit I was surprised at the difference in rendering, though I shouldn’t have been since its Microsoft so their HTML is probably far from any sort of standard.
I like this view, and I think I prefer it over MicroB. Firstly, nowhere near as much wasted space. I can see the folders I have under my inbox and also the first 5 or so emails. My only option would be the top toolbar, where the words “New” and , “View” and “Help” get stretched out over two lines, presumably to accommodate all the buttons.
As you can see, creating a new mail in Opera isn’t that different to MicroB. The taskbar again suffers from having the text spread out over two lines but other than that its standard.
The Calendar view is also pretty standard but I thought I’d include the screenshot for comparison purposes.
So there you go, in my opinion, stick with the Opera engine for OWA access, though it is functional on both and I had no problems reading email, sending, recieving, creating meetings etc.
Hope that helps someone!
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