Even before the Apple iPhone 3G introduced the idea of desktop-grade browsing to the masses, we were already surfing the Web in style on advanced multimedia smartphones, like the Nseries devices from Nokia. Today, we expect a lot more from our smartphone Web browser. Here are our top five browsers, in the order that we tried them.
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Nokia N95 8GB NAM introduces the mini-map
The Nokia Nseries devices were the first phones to truly impress us with their Web browsing capabilities, so of course the grand-daddy of the bunch, the fully loaded Nokia N95 with 8GB of storage and full access to AT&T's 3G HSDPA network, would top our list. The browser on this phone renders clean and accurate pages, and we love the mini-map feature, which presents a thumbnail view of the current page and lets you zoom in using a wireframe tool. The Nokia N95 8GB NAM can also keep thumbnails for a few pages in memory, which makes browsing back and forth between pages much easier, though this isn't as quick as full fledged tabbed browsing. Overall, for a device that's more than 2 years old, the Nokia N95 still keeps up with competitors.
Samsung Instinct uses a camera to help browsing
The Samsung Instinct browser had some stiff competition when it was launched. The phone is such an obvious Apple iPhone competitor that comparisons were inevitable, and the Samsung Instinct didn't come through unscathed. Still, the browser was a full-fledged Web crawling app, and despite some sluggishness, it was still quite capable. Samsung and Sprint have even updated the browser to improve performance since the phone was released. The phone has an interesting gimmick built into the Web browser app. If you hold the camera button, the phone uses the camera as a sort of optical mouse to scroll and pan Web pages. It wasn't very useful in our hands-on tests, but it was a neat trick, and sometimes it takes some innovative thinking and neat tricks to develop a truly useful tool, so we give credit to Samsung for trying something interesting.
Apple iPhone 3G reinvented mobile browsing
The original Apple iPhone had the best browser on the market when it was released, even though it lacked Flash media support, a growing necessity on today's Web. The Apple iPhone 3G browser improved only one aspect of the app - it got faster. Not at first. At first, we had the same problems as many other Apple iPhone 3G users, but with the latest Apple iPhone 2.1 software update, we've had very little trouble, and browsing speeds have been much faster. The browser introduced some great new concepts to the mobile market, including tapping for zooms and swiping for pans, but it was truly the slick responsiveness of the Apple iPhone as a whole that made the touchscreen browsing experience on this phone so superlative.
HTC Touch Diamond on Sprint is lightning fast, desktop grade
The HTC Touch Diamond on Sprint uses the Opera browser, which is the best third-party Web browser we've tried. But Opera gets a touch-friendly skin on the HTC Touch Diamond, and we found it to be a great looking app. What really won us over, though, is the browser's network performance. We get great Sprint EV-DO Rev. A reception in our lower Manhattan office, and when reception was good, this browser was screaming fast. It easily bested the Apple iPhone 3G's Safari browser in side-by-side tests under equal conditions, blew that phone away, in fact. We wish typing URLs was easier, but that's why HTC invented the HTC Touch Pro, with it's slide-out QWERTY keyboard, which will be available in early November on Sprint (check back in the next week for our full review of that phone).
T-Mobile G1 is simple and shiny, like Chrome (but not really)
The T-Mobile G1 doesn't use Google's new Chrome browser, but it does follow a similar philosophy by keeping things simple, and emphasizing speed and performance. This is the right way to go, as T-Mobile's 3G network is still blooming, so a browser that relies heavily on network speed would have been a disappointment. Instead, the Google browser on the T-Mobile G1 uses simple panning, with buttons for zooming and a magnifying glass-like mini map to browse large pages easily. The browser also supports multiple windows. We're still wondering if a third-party will launch a browser with Flash capabilities for the Android platform, but that's the best part about an open platform - the anticipation.
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