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The BlackBerry Browser surely cannot be long for this world – you can almost hear it creaking when you fire it up on the BlackBerry Bold 2 9700.
Well, perhaps that's a little harsh, but it's certainly not the most intuitive browser on the market, with constant hanging on websites, both on Wi-Fi and 3G connection (which we'd have hoped wouldn't be the case).
Evidence of this can be found in the fact RIM has recently purchased Torch Mobile, developers of Webkit (similar used in the iPhone and Android platforms) browsers, which means the company clearly knows it needs to up the game here.
If you're using Javascript, it causes websites to hang and look at their fingernails before looking up at you and saying 'oh, did you want to look at something here?'
And given the fact it happens more often than not, you can see why it's an irritation having to use the web browser on the BlackBerry Bold 2 9700.
Of course, you can install other browsers, but these can't be set as default, so we're not sure what else to do.
There are some nice touches in the browser, like the way you can set it to mimic Firefox when accessing certain pages. But other problems, like zooming in and out of pages, still exist, as shown by the fact you can click to zoom in, but have to press the alt key and click to zoom out.
We can see why RIM has used these keyboard shortcuts, but in today's pinch/zoom/twist/punch browser interaction society, this is starting to look a little dated.
Admittedly there are few options available for non-touchscreen phones, but we would have liked to see some better use of the trackpad and perhaps some improved smart-fit text resizing technology while we're at is as well.
The speed of the browser when working correctly isn't too bad, and we like the keyboard shortcuts on offer, but they're not really enough when some websites don't let you in for ages.
Perhaps we're being too harsh on a phone range that's never really been geared for internet browsing thanks to a prior lack of 3G. But given that we're marking phones down for not being able to play flash, it's not really acceptable for a phone to struggle with Javascript.
