Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe with PocketNow and today we've gotten the Dolphin Browser HD we've shown you this before but they just released version 5.0 beta 1 let's go take a look alright this is a beta first and foremost it is not available in the market as of the time of this recording you have to download from their website so make sure you head over to pocketnow.com so you can get a download link so you can try it on your own Android powered phone but once you go ahead and download it and I just scan a QR code and downloaded it straight down here to my downloads folder it's a just a little bit over 2 megabytes but I've installed that I've played with it and then I uninstalled it so I could show you the installation process because it's a little bit different than than what you'd expect it's a little bit different from what I remember in previous versions of Dolphin so I thought it would be good just to go back to basis and show you what it looks like through the process so as we do that this is a t-mobile g2 running CyanogenMod seven nightly which is a Android 2.3.4 ROM you can see all the permissions that this is going to be given go ahead and install it I am connected over Wi-Fi so speeds should not be significantly degraded by the network connection go ahead and open it installs very fast at this point you're given a big long line or a big long and use your license agreement which isn't all that cool but ok it's basically saying that you agree to share analytic data you agree that the terms can be changed anytime without having notified you yeah go ahead and read this stuff but it's just kind of annoying that they have it in there most apps don't will go ahead and accept that welcome to Dolphin HD and runs us through a short setup wizard now this is something that Brandon showed you in a recent video it's about plug-in support if you want to make your device faster turn off plug-in support or set it to on demand so when you're loading a webpage up that has you know 10 or 12 flash objects on it instead of loading all those and taking all the time for that it's just gonna put placeholders in there and if you want to load one of those you tap on it and it will then go out and grab that resource and load it into the screen so really speeds up your browsing experience if you're not using those flash components and most of the time we don't when you think about what is flash it's games its ads primarily and that's about it so if you don't want to see those flash ads no problem just keep an on-demand or never and if you want to see the videos then just go ahead and keep it on demand so that when you want to see that you can tap and it will load so very easy I'm gonna set it to the default here just your settings this is one of the cool things about about dolphin and that's you can use on-screen gestures to write what you want just with a simple finger stroke if you will we can either hide it set it to the bottom left or the bottom right it defaults to the bottom left so it'll be right down here we'll accept that and go next data storage this is something that I disagree with the the default setting it defaults to caching to phone I like to cache to sd card that's probably because I have a fast SD card if your SD card is slow it doesn't have a class on it or class - you may want to cache it to phone but my internal storage is very precious to me so I move it over to the SD card next the volume button this is something that is really cool with this browser and it takes me back to my Windows Mobile days the volume button right over here is a rocker so I got up and down well once I am inside the Dolphin Browser the Dolphin Browser can remap that volume button so it can either use the default action you know which would either be volume up or down or media volume up or down scroll up and down the page or even switch tabs well this stroll up and down the page I happen to like quite a bit because that was the old behavior of that that volume rocker over on Windows Mobile not Windows Phone Windows mobile we're talking away long ago so I'll go ahead and set it to that we'll go next user-agent this is what you want in this browser to tell other the websites basically that you visit do you want this to be the Android browser which is the default a desktop browser iPhone iPad or custom now you can set a custom one so if you want this look like Internet Explorer 6 you can and then those websites will respond back accordingly not every website has user agent sniffing or user agent handling but some of them do and for those that do it might look better in one or the other for example they may have just said well I want to make my website look good on the iPhone and forgot that oh you know what there's androids out there too so this is a way you can go over and change that on a browser wide basis rather than a site by site basis so we'll leave it at Android go to next some other settings that we have but we can either show the pinch-to-zoom button or add shortcuts the home screen will go ahead and do both and if you're gonna add shortcuts to the home screen you're gonna need to have some room on your home screen it will try and find room on any one of your home screens but it will throw an error if you can't find any so let's go ahead and choose next alright keep updated with us they want your email address and yes you do have to fill it out it is a beta that's one of the requirements so we'll go ahead and do that so I am Joe at see if I can type good on screen and I'm at it kind of an odd angle so looking at what I'm typing and actually typing is a little bit different and it did an autocorrect for me there so Joe at Joe Levi comm we will finish and then we're presented with the Dolphin Browser down here in the corner you can see kind of a shadowed version of a finger that is your gesture button when you tap on that it comes up and it shows you how to do a gesture and go back or you can go into the gesture settings so here are the settings that are pre-built in adding a bookmark back forward go to bottom go to top Facebook and yes those who just heard that that's new mail I have the Star Trek communicator because I've got so many people in my office that have androids now I know I was like the second person there and now everybody has them so I had to find a new notification sound and that's what that is just in case you're wondering because I know you're gonna ask about it in the comment so we can go ahead and do this all kinds of nice stuff we can go in and change things if we want to but you know I'm pretty happy with those so let's go ahead and go back there's a recommended add-on here it's gonna do this the first time you use it you can go out to the market and download this bookmarks to SD which is essentially going to backup or allow you to back the preneur store your bookmarks from various different dolphin based browsers to your SD card and it's also going to keep your google bookmarks synced up with it if you want to try it you say ok it will take you to the market so you can download that I'm gonna say cancel I assume by saying cancel it won't remind me again because there is a never button right there so we'll go ahead and cancel that over here you'll notice we've got a tab to interface so here's our first tab it's got the Dolphin Browser there's a plus button over here we'll go ahead and open that up and very very chrome like I've got all of these speed tabs or speed dial buttons or I could go to I assume this is going to be the top part is something you can set it's got this little plus button down on the bottom it has the most visited website so it separates the two out for you you can have your own bookmarks essentially frequently these bookmarks up here and then it will remember what websites you visit most frequently of course everybody wants to see what it looks like going over to and again it's hard for me to type at this strange angle doing it on camera so Brandon you're gonna love this we have a new website it's pocket baucom so pocketnow.com but before i hit enter on that what i want to do is pull out this nexus 1 which is also running a CyanogenMod nightly and we're just gonna open up the stock browser again we're on the same Wi-Fi network over here so we're going to go to pocket now which is spelled with the W now.com and again I'm sorry guys I'm looking at this at a weird angle so we've got the two pocket now pocket now all right let's go ahead and hit the Go button on both of these and almost exactly as fast on both of them the mobile version of the pocket now website came up all kinds of good let's switch over to the desktop version and I started a little bit earlier on the g2 than the Nexus One but you can see the speed over here on the Dolphin Browser is a little bit quicker than over on the the Nexus One at least in initial loan and initial functionality both of them look good they've rendered everything appropriately I have flash turned on apparently over here on the Nexus One so our flash ads are coming up and displaying we're over here you can see this ad right here has the missing plug-in link so I can tap on that and then it will go through and reload the page with the the flash component in there so kind of interesting one thing to note is it did that not only for that flash piece about that flash piece as well so it looks like it's a page wide flash turn on not just an individual component so kind of neat let's see if we can go to a another website and I'm gonna be a little bit self-serving here and we're gonna head out to Joe Levi dot-com now this site is not mobile optimized at this point in time it's desktop browser optimized mobile is coming eventually whenever I get time for it but just to see what it looks like on both of these let's go ahead and go I do have a randomization script running on there so it's gonna look a little bit different a little bit faster initial load over here but overall about the same speeds between the the two browsers scrolling around is a little bit a little bit nicer on the nexus one because I've got this interesting that little characteristic and that's what I'm gonna get into next so this page then this is why I deliberately picked my page is wider and then then what I can see in what what's called a viewport the viewable area of the screen is should be important web development terminology I have to scroll back and forth to be able to see it but the Dolphin Browser has a feature where you can scroll over to the side and get your bookmarks bar which is cool and scroll over to the other side and get your plugins and other stuff over there so you've got this other functionality built in that kind of can get in the way if you go too far over in being able to navigate around a to wide screen so it's a feature that's there and it's neat and I like it but it's also a feature that can get in the way so it's gonna take a little bit of getting used to for you to realize what's going on and whatnot another thing I like about this in addition to the visual tabs that it's got across the top and being able to add a new tab quickly and easily is this RSS button I can easily tap on that and it takes me to my RSS handler which in this case is Google Reader so it wants me to sign in there and let's see if we can do a gesture and go back that one didn't work too well for us did it oh that's because it opened in a new tab okay so let's go ahead and close the tab that's something I didn't notice is it open in another tab I only have the two it didn't give me a good indication that I had more stuff over on the side so be aware of that but it does give you RSS which the default browser coming back over here does not have some of the HTC Sense browsers do have that RSS handling which I really really like I'm a big RSS advocate but overall speed is really good compatibility with sites is really good being able to play plugins especially flash also good you do have to have the Flash app or the Flash plugin installed to be able to do that but for a beta there are some kinks there are some hang-ups it is still very nice it is a great evolution of the Dolphin Browser and if you've been looking around you know kind of on the sidelines waiting to go over to an alternate browser go ahead and give this a try there's only one more thing that I want to mention here and that's if you go back home and so here's our Dolphin Browser okay two things that I want to mention come over to an empty area of the screen we can add a shortcut and that shortcut can be a bookmark okay the bookmark is gonna open up in your default web browser you can also add a dolphin bookmark which is going to open that bookmark in the Dolphin Browser so that's really kind of nice and that gets me to what I was gonna say is if we come down here and launch the browser action in this case it's opening up the browser but if I had that bookmark over here it would pop up with a dialog and ask me hey what app do you want to use to complete this action and it comes up a lot you have to specify a default winner it's gonna harass you sometimes two and three and four times per webpage especially if that web pages has frame sets on it so if you want to try it set it as your default browser it's easy to unset that as your default or to uninstall it if you want to as well but definitely worth the download and the try again the link for the beta version download is going to be over at pocketnow.com so make sure you go ahead and take a look at that if you like seeing these kind of beta videos so you can either try them or no not to try them yourself make sure you give this video a big thumbs up if you haven't yet told your friends about pocket now now is the time to do it and of course if you are watching this over on YouTube make sure you subscribe to our videos that's really the best way to keep up to date on technology the website has an awful lot of stuff coming to it we've got an RSS feed to help keep you up to date there you can also do basically the same thing with YouTube so that you can keep up to date with the videos there as well subscribing is free as always and comments on both the video and the articles are greatly appreciated and encouraged if you've got questions comments or saw something that I didn't mention or glossed over too fast make sure you let us know that in the comments so that we can share that with everyone else who is reading the article and watching the videos so for pocket now and pocket now videos I'm Joe Levi