PhoneTalk

Android smartphones are highly customizable thanks to the loads of apps available in the Android Market. Although many apps are free we don’t all have the time to try out each one in a specific category. Enter our first mobile app roundup to help take the guessing out of the app selecting equation. We’re starting off this new series by checking out mobile web browsers. For the uninitiated, a mobile web browser is used to surf the web on a cell phone, and every Android phone is equipped with a ‘stock’ browser for this very purpose. For some users the stock browser might be just fine, but others may want to get more out of mobile surfing such as the ability to switch between a company’s mobile website and its full website found with a desktop browser or even a faster browsing experience.

In this showdown, we pit seven mobile web browsers (including the stock browser founded on most smartphones) against one another to see how they rate. Here are the final results:

Read the full review of each browser:

• "Stock" Browser
• Opera Mobile 11.1
• Dolphin HD
• xScope
• Firefox
• Skyfire
• Miren

We used a DROID 3 by Motorola using Verizon service with a 1GHz dual-core processor running Android 2.3.4 to test the browsers. We stayed in the same location and used the phone’s 3G connection when testing each browser. We downloaded each browser from the Android Market and they all installed without a hitch. We rated the browsers in four categories:

• Browsing Speed – This is how fast the page loads. We used CNN’s mobile site and full website for this test. The mobile site is far less graphic intensive and is designed to fit on the phone screen to just scroll up and down for headlines, while the full site requires zooming in and out and scrolling in every direction (left, right, up and down).
• Page Display - We’re looking at how the browser displays web pages. This includes rendering and determining if the browser loads the entire page or just a section.
• Navigation - This goes beyond typical web page navigation and includes features such as tabbed browsing.
• Extra Features - Each of the browsers have a key selling point that differentiates it from other options available.

Topics: Motorola Smart phones Android Google Apps