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The internet experience on the iPhone is without par. End of story. Until the likes of Mozilla brings a decent experience with the Fennec mobile browser, we're all going to have to sit back and marvel at how well Apple managed to bring browsing to a mobile phone.
The quandary is obvious: how do you put internet sites designed for a larger screen on a tiny one? Mobile sites are, quite frankly, rubbish, and larger sites take a long time to load and are too expansive to view in one go.
Many people will be outraged that we call Apple's Safari browser the best when it doesn't bring Flash compatibility, but that is its blessing and its curse in one. While some sites might lose out on functionality, the vast majority of web browsing on the mobile will benefit. Flash-heavy sites very rarely bring something of great worth to the mobile experience, and thus its absence (until a decent solution can be found) should be applauded.
The improved processing speed is very much apparent when browsing the internet, with Apple claiming some sites load over twice as quickly, especially when combined with new 7.2Mbps download speeds.
While some sites did indeed feel a lot more snappy (not that they were particularly slow in previous iPhones) the main difference was felt when multiple pages were opened.
We managed to pull out eight separate tabs on the iPhone 3GS before things started to fall apart and judder, which is clearly enough for anyone on the go - we always could find three or four that we weren't using any more and forgot to close down.
This is probably a problem Apple needs to fix, as unless you want to open up all your tabs, there's no way to simply shut down a window, so the open tabs simply mount up until you notice there's a problem.
It's hard to even think of a browser that comes close to the Safari experience, with Opera Mini / Mobile probably the pick of the bunch, mostly because it employs similar functionality to Safari Mobile with features such as double-tapping to reformat the text to fit a mobile screen, so if Apple has any mobile internet laurels, it will surely be tempted to have a quick lie down on them.
