10. Web Browsing Compared

The TG01 is also the first device with Internet Explorer 6 Mobile. This is a huge advance from Pocket IE, but apart from the Flash support, it feels more like it’s playing catch-up with the iPhone and Android browsers. Presumably to keep the load off the network–and your data plan–it defaults to loading mobile pages instead of telling Websites that it’s IE6 in order to access the standard version of the page. You can switch that quickly enough from the menu, and it’s great to be able to load full Web pages without worrying about browser features, but good mobile browsing needs more than just putting a PC Web page on a small screen.

The zoom bar is very disappointing because you can’t zoom in nearly as far as you want to. It turns out that the zoom is only useful for letting you navigate around a large page, not for zooming in and reading the text or viewing the images at a useful size. Panning around by swiping the screen is also a little hit and miss—sometimes pages scrolled smoothly, sometimes they jumped to the bottom of the page and stayed there until we zoomed out.

There are more browser settings tucked away in the Toshiba utilities. By default, "high-speed" browsing is turned on, with a warning that this affects the battery life. The option to speed up browsing by using the phone’s memory (presumably as cache) is off by default, with a warning that this makes the phone slower to start up and shut down (because it doesn’t have access to as much memory), although we didn’t notice a lag.

The Touch Pro2 doesn’t try to be so ambitious and uses the same Opera 9.5 browser HTC puts on its other handsets. This doesn’t have Flash and won’t render all the pages that the IE 6 Mobile will, but it does give you multiple tabs and it deals with the majority of pages well enough. The zoom bar on the Touch Pro2 works very well with Opera, but you can’t zoom as far out as on the TG01, so you can see the full width of a page but not a thumbnail view of it. However, you can zoom in much farther, so you can read the smallest of captions.

Opera lets you save pages to read later, but that takes some planning to be useful, so HTC's software saves the newest content from each page you visit so you can read it later. You can add a "push page" to the list by typing in the URL and title and picking the schedule (every one, three, six, 12, or 24 hours) and you’ll always have the most recent page to look at. Yet again, the Touch Pro2 may not have the technical advances of the TG01, but it proves to have more useful features.