Enhance your downloading experience in the S60 Browser

The S60 Browser (as found on 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 devices) is great for enabling a web browsing experience very close to that on a computer.
Nevertheless, I've had three issues with it.

The first one was the fact that it doesn't feature a download manager with functionality even close to what you'd get on a computer.

The second, its inability to handle downloads of file formats not supported by the phone's software (.RAR comes to mind, but there are others as well).

And the third and most painful for me, the endless need for horizontal scrolling (since it renders pages like you'd see them on a computer and the display resolution in the S60 world is usually 240x320, a lot smaller than your average 1024x768 on a computer, this is logical in a way).

Good news! The first two issues mentioned above can now be fixed! (The scrolling problem remains, I will detail this in a later post on the various browsers available for S60 devices).
Let me explain.

Download Manager



There is a Python-based download manager available for S60, called SmartGET by Albert Gazetdinov. Vaibhav Sharma from The Symbian Blog has tested it before I was able to, and reports it works pretty well. You just need to copy the the link(s) for the stuff you want to download, then paste it/them into SmartGET. There are options to resume, pause, set download times and so on. You can download up to 5 files simultaneously, it features a progress bar and even automatically monitors the clipboard for links (if this works, there's no need to copy and paste links - this option is however available if clipboard monitoring fails somehow).

Vaibhav has uploaded SmartGET to his Mosh account, you can get it from there.

If you don't have Python installed, download it from here and install it before SmartGET.

[Source: The Symbian Blog]

Downloading files that are not natively supported by S60

Suppose you get an email with a .RAR file attached. Normally, you wouldn't be able to download it, since the OS doesn't natively support opening files with that extension. But, again Vaibhav Sharma of The Symbian Blog has found a solution (described to him by a reader of his blog) to overcome this limitation. Since there are 3rd party apps that can handle a lot more file formats than the OS natively supports (the X-plore file manager by LCG, for example, supports .RAR archives), this is very handy.

There is a catch however, in order for the 'trick' to work, you'll need both X-plore (which is free) and Core Player 1.2 (which is not, and sadly there is no trial version either; however it is, in my opinion, the best video player for S60, so if you don't mind taking my word for it, go ahead and buy it).

Click here for the very detailed tutorial that Vaibhav wrote. Note that although he uses a .RAR file in the tutorial, the same can be done for ANY file format.

Also of note is the fact that the same can be achieved in an even simpler way by using another Web Browser, such as Opera Mobile. It isn't free, but there is an extended trial period available (with full functionality) and right now it is the browser I use most of the time. It features an integrated download manager (not quite as advanced as SmartGET, but a lot better than the one found in the S60 Browser, and can download any file, regardless of the extension.

[Source: The Symbian Blog]

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