Browsing the Web while you're on the move is one of the perks of owning a smartphone. The new touchscreen phones now entering the market are ideal for this job, as they're equipped to display Web pages on their large, high-resolution screens.
The Palm Pre, iPhone, and Android browsers were designed specifically for touchscreen phones. In contrast, the S60 browser that Nokia's touchscreen phones use goes back to an older S60 interface that did not focus on touchscreen use. This fact may explain some of the S60 browser's lingering limitations.
Most people would agree that Apple's mobile Safari browser is one of the iPhone's great strengths. While Steve Jobs leaned on the iPhone engineers to get the new device just right, on the other side of the house Apple's browser people also felt under pressure to do their part. Everyone at Apple knew that much of the iPhone's magic would lie in the way it accessed Web content.
Research In Motion's BlackBerry Storm features a Java-based full-HTML browser, which RIM claims is in the same class with the browsers on iPhone, Palm Pre, Nokia, and Android devices. In many respects, that assertion is true.
The Palm Pre's WebOS browser is a relatively recent entrant in the mobile browser arena, arriving in early June of this year. But the Pre's new mobile browser comes fully prepared for a battle royale with other leading smartphone browsers.
The main page of the Android browser looks a bit more crowded than that of the iPhone or Palm Pre browser; but overall the Android browser competes very well with its peers. The Android browser is built into Google's Android mobile operating system and tightly integrated with it.