Below is a review of Minimo that forum user  relyimah provided way back in March and that I have taken an age to put up.  I have to send out a huge apology to  relyimah for taking so long.  User reviews are much appreciated and we really shouldn't take so long to put them on the front page.

Minimo CE Version 0.003 (Early Development)
http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/MinimoCE_0.003.zip

First of all, I would like to mention that I am using a HP iPAQ RX3715 (Mobile Media Edition) and my Internet Connection is via the builtin wireless radio to a 1500k ADSL connection.

Installation
From what I can tell, there is no sort of installation mechanism as yet, so I copied the 11 or so Mb of extracted files onto my SD card, and put it in.

First Run (SD Card)
I ran the file WinEmbed.exe, and sure enough, after a while, I was presented with a very ugly interface, of which the first thing I noticed was that the bar that is normally at the top of my device (start menu, wireless activity, time, etc) was now at the bottom, and where it used to be was a simple combo box and some buttons.

It had found my homepage that was set in the PocketIE settings, which was of course, http://www.google.com and took its sweet time loading the page (more than double the time that PocketIE takes. Not only this, but when I tried to search for something, I could not get it to display any of my results.

In short, I was very disappointed. But, I decided to give it another go, this time copying the files to the iPAQ Storage section of my device, thinking that maybe it was slow because the device had trouble reading the SD card or something.

Second Run (On the Device)
Just to be sure, I copied the files onto my device (not much free space left now I assure you) and ran it from there. A little more pleasing.

For starters, the application loaded faster (I was later told that SD card reading is terribly slow on PDAs) and the web pages loaded faster (almost identical to PocketIE. The page renders perfectly (I tested it with http://www.robsawyer.com.au only because I knew it had a lot of images and layout to render. The page looked as it would in Firefox on my Windows PC. The images don't automatically resize for you as they do in PocketIE, and everything looks excellent.

The interface is still ugly. I am not sure if I am missing something, but there is a whole heap of folders for the chrome theme, etc, though I can't seem to get anything but default grey buttons.

Missing Features
Here are a list of features that I think Minimo will need before it will be worth using/marketing:

• Look and Feel of Firefox
• Ability to set Home Page
• Ability to set preferences such as download of cookies
• Tabbed browsing ?

I'm sure there are a few things that I have forgotten in this list, but its still in development stages and hard to use.

Other Platforms
Minimo is actually being developed more for the Familiar platform, which is Linux for your PDA. I have not actually tested this version of Minimo as I do not want to flash my PDA with Familiar just yet as I will be doing some .NET programming for PDAs this semester. For more information, though, visit http://www.familiar.org

In Conclusion
Minimo has its advantages for anti-windows buffs only for the time being. I can't see it being of use to someone who wants to look at a few pages when they are in a coffee shop or something. They may as well use the better tested PocketIE for now.

Minimo will eventually (hopefully) be a nice repalcement for PocketIE, having gained most of the basic functionality for now. Remember, though, that it is in very early stages of development....

Picture courtesy of Doug Turner, Minimo lead developer.  (Note that it is of the MTekk home page).