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We liked the browsing experience on the Palm Pre Plus, but the screen size here hinders our enjoyment a little. The problem is that the full page is shown on the screen, rather than just the top half.
In most cases text is too small to read without pinching to zoom, but thankfully that works really well, with images and text rendering fairly quickly. Probably not quickly enough for it to be considered a completely fluid experience.
A double-tap on the screen also zooms into a semi-readable size.
We're grateful to have such a good multi-touch screen on a device of this pricepoint. It really is without fault. It's super-responsive and extremely accurate – without hesitation we'd say it was the best available on a mid-range phone by an absolute mile.
The browser is pretty decent still. The touchscreen is forgiving enough to know what you're aiming for most of the time. It's also very handy to have several web windows open as application cards.
It's relatively simple to access bookmarks and history from the tab in the top-left corner of the screen, but that's tiny and easy to miss. There's no Flash, so online video is out, for the most part.
The browser is quite intuitive though. Simply start typing within the application and the URL bar comes up, offering page suggestions or Google and Wiki searches.
As we mentioned earlier in the review, the gesture area allows us to easily move backwards and forwards within web pages by swiping to the left to go back and swiping to the right to go forward.
In terms of connectivity, we have all the usual gubbins here and the same specifications as the Palm Pre Plus. Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, 7.2Mbps HSDPA, GPRS, Edge and aGPS, as well as Bluetooth 2.1+EDR. Everything you'd expect from a modern smartphone, really.
Like on the Pre, we struggled to find other devices using Bluetooth. Wi-Fi maintained signal once and the O2 3G was reliable, even when we were out in the sticks.
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