Five Reasons Dolphin Still Offers Better Browsing on a Nexus One

Hey Nexus One users, I know you’re still celebrating your bloodless coup over Google — the spoils of war being the duly deserved but unjustly denied multitouch action that the Nexus One lacked until yesterday’s Android 2.1 software update – but as your fingers do the pinch happy dance, consider these wise words: pinch-to-zoom alone does not a great browser make.

Although Android’s stock browser is all the better for its newfound multitouch functionality, it’s far from the best option for browsing the web at the highest echelon of gesture-based interfaces. That award lies with Dolphin Browser 2.0, which takes multitouch-enabled browsing to the next level and gives you a few cool tricks not found  in other Android browsers. We reviewed Dolphin 2.0 last week, but in case you’re curious, here are five reasons it’s better than the stock Android browser, even when the stock browser is armed with pinch-to-zoom.

1. Additional Multitouch Gestures -  Dolphin’s smartest feature is by far the use of customizable touch gestures. Twenty-three commands like “Bookmark a Page”, “Save Link to Read It Later”, “Browse Forward”, or “Browse Backward”, etc — can be set to execute with a single-stroke gesture defined by the user. Can you use your finger to draw a circle in Nexus One’s browser and have the current web page refresh itself? Nope.

2. Start a Tab, or Six – If you’re the kind of stimulation-seeking Web surfer who sits at a desktop PC with 15, 20, 25 tabs open in a single Firefox session, you’ll appreciate Dolphin Browser’s ability to browse the net with as many as six tabs. Sure, it’s not 25 active webpages, but it is six more tabs than the baked-in browser can perform.

3. Swiper, No Swiping –  Dolphin Browser lets you move to content opened in other tabs by swiping your finger left or right. In the stock browser the same action is a three-step process: you’ll need to open the menu, select the “Windows” option, and select the page you’d like to view from a vertical list of your thumbnailed Web pages.

4. Robo-RSS – We’ve mentioned stimulation-seekers already,  but not information-hunters. That category of Nexus One users will undoubtedly dig Dolphin’s  RSS retrieval and notification capability. Once found on a page you’re viewing, feeds are added to Android’s notification area where the end-user can add them to Google Reader, or delete them if they aren’t interested.

5. YouTube to Go – Though it plays well with Google services of all shades and shapes, Dolphin has an exceptionally close relationship with YouTube. So close, in fact, you can use Dolphin to download user videos directly to your handset in mp4 format and view them offline.

To recap, features like gesture control and tab-to-tab swiping really demonstrate Dolphin’s forward-thinking approach to utilizing multitouch within a mobile browser, and goodies like links to a beanstalked list of Google services, as well as Delicious, Facebook, and Twitter integration (all built into the browser’s homescreen) make this browser even better. There are more details in our full review, or just go ahead and dip your fingers in bydownloading Dolphin straight from the Android Market.