76.4 MB in a week …
76.4MB. That’s how much data I have transferred (sent and received) on my iPhone since I started using it a week ago. The Safari web browser on the iPhone is miles ahead of Palm’s Blazer or even Opera Mini. The iPhone’s larger screen of course is an advantage, making the whole browsing experience on a mobile device so much easier and more fun.
The iPhone’s built-in accelerometer automatically detects when you turn the phone on its side. In Safari, it will turn from portrait to landscape mode. In landscape mode, the virtual keyboard is larger and wider, so you can comfortably type using two thumbs. The virtual keyboard does have some tricks up its sleeve, for example adding a “.com” key and a forward slash key in lieu of the space bar when you enter URLs.
Safari is a full-featured web browser (minus Flash and Java), so most websites look good on it. The sites always start scrunched up in a full screen. When you double-tap, it zooms in on the specific area that you want. You can also use the pinching method to enlarge or reduce the web site. Web browsing on the EDGE network, however, is a hit and miss affair. Sometimes it’s very fast, sometimes it lags.
Where Safari really shines is on iPhone-optimized websites. Many websites do this nowadays, from Digg to Facebook and of course the entire suite of Google services (Gmail, Google Documents, etc). These iPhone-optimized websites are very fast to download and use Javascript to great effect. I always prefer to use the iPhone Facebook site rather than the full version. Even generic mobile web sites work well — you can see some of our previous recommendations in Treo Today’s Mobile Web Sites category.
Bookmarking websites is a very easy process, just two taps. Searching is even easier. When you click on the URL bar, a Google (or Yahoo, if you prefer) search box is just underneath.
Conclusion : I love Safari on the iPhone. It’s fast and very easy to use — all the knowledge in the world is just a couple of taps away.
Filed under: iPhone
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