A quite good alternative to Safari
Today we’d like to introduce you to an alternative browser to Safari. Dolphin is available for iPhone and iPod Touch as well as for Android systems.
For you we tested the recently released iOS version.
The browser doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it comes with new concepts for mobile web which are not provided by Safari as of now. You can add tabs as you would do it at your computer and if necessary you can change to full view. Swipe from right to left on your screen to access the toolbar which includes more useful features like a download list. Speaking of downloads we found that images can’t be saved to the image roll. Wondering why that is we hope they will update this soon as it turns out to be quite annoying.
Probably the most thrilling feature is the direct integration of social network options. Unlike any other iPhone browser we know off you can share pages to Twitter with the click of a button. For heavy twitter users who love to share what they find this is a priceless feature as it saves the hassle of copying URLs into Twitter apps. Only problem is that it doesn’t grab the meta information like page title. You have to add that manually.
Dolphin also integrated magazine-style Twitter, Facebook and Reader feeds. Those work fine until you try to access a link in a status update. This plainly doesn’t work. Guys, what’s the point of that? Usually the most interesting updates are those with links. If I can’t click them they aren’t useful anymore and I’m left there hanging in open air. Solve it quick, please!
In the bottom toolbar can find a quick selection for the gesture tool. It allows you to draw 8 different predefined gestures at the screen to navigate within the browser. This is a nice feature but not really necessary. If you’re missing a gesture you simply “teach” Dolphin. Just draw a new symbol and link it to your desired website. However, playing around with that feature revealed a few bugs as many new gestures tend to be interpreted as already existing ones, which would have you overwrite the old ones.
Other features are
Like every other alternative browser for iOS, Dolphin is based on Safari’s webkit engine since Apple doesn’t really allow other browser options. Due to apple politics, Dolphin can’t be used as standard browser which means that if you’re e.g. opening a link in an app it’ll still open with Safari. However you should test the free download. It upgrades Safari with a few useful features and is fun to use. It only appears that the developers seemed to be in a rush to publish the app as some really useful parts of the browser are so sloppily implemented that they become nothing but visually appealing sidekicks with no use whatsoever.
With a few bug fixes in the next upgrade I see some great potential for awesomeness :)
Data sheet:
Price: – for free
System: – iOS min. 4.0
Size: – 3,6MB
Language: – English
Advertisement: – no
optimized for Retina Display (iPhone4): – yes
Multitasking: – yes
Universal-App: – no
Push-notification: – no
Download:
Screenshots
MO
