Show Posts
1
Tech Hotline / Severe image compression on mobile data (East Bay area, CA)
« on: November 15, 2011, 07:32:54 pm »
Recently I've noticed that the images pulled up in the browser on my phone (Opera Mobile, for those interested) look like crap.
I mean, sure, they always did look a bit yucky while scrolling, but generally once I stopped moving the page around, they'd sharpen back up. Now they aren't sharpening back up at all--unless I'm on wifi, then it works fine (as it should).
I wouldn't mind if they compressed images slightly to add a bit more responsiveness, but these images look awful, as if they were saved at below 50% jpeg image quality.
I've searched around xda and the web for info on this, but there simply aren't any recent threads about it. Everything is from two or three years ago, or doesn't apply on TMOUS, most of the complaints are directed at T-Mobile UK, which is neither here nor there.
So yeah. This is annoying. I don't like my images looking so bad, and some of them, especially on sites like Engadget and Anantech where the front-page images are already compressed for speed of loading, they look not like images at all but simply fuzzy blobs of color!
Thus annoyed, I called T-Mobile and complained. I'm not sure how legit their answer was, but it would line up with what I've seen. I don't remember my images being compressed on the handset before a few days ago, and the T-Mobile representative said there was something wrong with the system and it was being worked on, but she didn't know when it'd be fixed. This sort of makes sense, because I never experienced excessive image compression before.
I don't see though how a system issue could cause a transparent proxy to start compressing all of my images out of the blue, though. I suppose some devices (maybe featurephones and the like) would get routed through the proxy to make them run faster, but I remember everything looking just as good in Opera Mobile on my NS as it did in Firefox on my laptop, regardless of whether I was on wifi or 3G.
Is anyone else experiencing this issue? I know it's not my device. All of the demo handsets at the Berkeley T-Mobile retail store were experiencing the same issue. The rep's own SGS2 was doing it. The WP7 handsets were doing it. My partner's G2 is also doing it. Thus it doesn't appear to be related to my device, to my particular ROM or kernel, to my mobile browser or even to Android as a whole.
It's absolutely a transparent proxy that's compressing the images and I can't make it stop. I've even tried adding "Blazer/4.0" to my Opera UA string, and it works on some sites but not most. I'm not sure if this is a permanent change T-Mobile has made to conserve bandwidth, or if it's really a malfunction in the system where smartphones are not properly being identified as such and are getting the "optimized" connection meant for slower devices (featurephones et al).
I mean, sure, they always did look a bit yucky while scrolling, but generally once I stopped moving the page around, they'd sharpen back up. Now they aren't sharpening back up at all--unless I'm on wifi, then it works fine (as it should).
I wouldn't mind if they compressed images slightly to add a bit more responsiveness, but these images look awful, as if they were saved at below 50% jpeg image quality.
I've searched around xda and the web for info on this, but there simply aren't any recent threads about it. Everything is from two or three years ago, or doesn't apply on TMOUS, most of the complaints are directed at T-Mobile UK, which is neither here nor there.
So yeah. This is annoying. I don't like my images looking so bad, and some of them, especially on sites like Engadget and Anantech where the front-page images are already compressed for speed of loading, they look not like images at all but simply fuzzy blobs of color!
Thus annoyed, I called T-Mobile and complained. I'm not sure how legit their answer was, but it would line up with what I've seen. I don't remember my images being compressed on the handset before a few days ago, and the T-Mobile representative said there was something wrong with the system and it was being worked on, but she didn't know when it'd be fixed. This sort of makes sense, because I never experienced excessive image compression before.
I don't see though how a system issue could cause a transparent proxy to start compressing all of my images out of the blue, though. I suppose some devices (maybe featurephones and the like) would get routed through the proxy to make them run faster, but I remember everything looking just as good in Opera Mobile on my NS as it did in Firefox on my laptop, regardless of whether I was on wifi or 3G.
Is anyone else experiencing this issue? I know it's not my device. All of the demo handsets at the Berkeley T-Mobile retail store were experiencing the same issue. The rep's own SGS2 was doing it. The WP7 handsets were doing it. My partner's G2 is also doing it. Thus it doesn't appear to be related to my device, to my particular ROM or kernel, to my mobile browser or even to Android as a whole.
It's absolutely a transparent proxy that's compressing the images and I can't make it stop. I've even tried adding "Blazer/4.0" to my Opera UA string, and it works on some sites but not most. I'm not sure if this is a permanent change T-Mobile has made to conserve bandwidth, or if it's really a malfunction in the system where smartphones are not properly being identified as such and are getting the "optimized" connection meant for slower devices (featurephones et al).