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Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

smozzy.com

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Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#31

Post by tomBobs »

rorrr wrote: post #2

This is hilarious, gotta be the most inefficient way to access the web.

Richard Stallman's way is a close 2nd:

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/009889.html

Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#34

Post by saurik »

SwellJoe wrote: post #5

One of these days, the network providers are going to stop putting arbitrary labels on their data, as though "voice", "text" and "data" are not all travelling through the same towers and pipes.

These three activities have different QoS constraints: "voice" data is real time, lossy, and therefore has hardware assisted compression and routing; text messages and data are non-lossy, but have drastically different timing and retry constraints. So, even if they "traveled through the same towers and pipes" (they don't, a detail more expanded on by mdasen in his comment), it wouldn't make sense to charge the same for them as they have different cost requirements (although it might be somewhat more equal than it is now; in particular, text messages, which occupy valuable and limited control channel space, would likely become cheaper).

Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#36

Post by jmaygarden »

lancefisher wrote: post #28
FaceKicker wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requests (which are just URLs, and any postdata/cookies if applicable) are sent to my server via SMS. The responses are sent back to the phone via MMS, in up to 5 (I think?) segments. I download the webpage along with all resources (stylesheets, images, etc.) and put everything in a zip file. I encode the zip file as a PNG (each RGB pixel is 3 bytes of the zip file) and send the PNG in the MMS.

That's really cool. I didn't realize you could do a lossless 24-bit palette with PNG.

A PNG is pretty much a zlib compressed bitmap.

Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#38

Post by FaceKicker »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #37

This is gonna get shut down so fast...

I'd be surprised if so, the userbase is probably going to be pretty tiny. It's not really easy to get an Android phone without a data plan (although it's possible), and there's not really any reason to use it otherwise, other than initial curiosity.

Re: Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan

#39

Post by ars »

jmaygarden wrote: post #36
lancefisher wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really cool. I didn't realize you could do a lossless 24-bit palette with PNG.

A PNG is pretty much a zlib compressed bitmap.

That's not true. PNG has some filters that pre-compress the image before sending it to zlib.
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