TouchBrowser V1.1.3 not there yet...

TouchBrowser is a mobile browser product for Windows Mobile (uses Pocket IE to render html). Werner gave the low-down on the 1.0 product here that I pretty much had to agree with--I was also reviewing it at the time. The folks at Makayama were gracious enough to provide me an updated version (1.1.3), which really didn't seem much different. So, I have to say it still needs some work, but after playing with it for a few days...

Okay, let me be clear... If you want a great, FREE mobile browser that supports javascript, page tap zooming, smooth animated scrolling, etc, etc (check out one of Werner's bibles for details), TouchBrowser isn't that product...yet. I'm admittedly no programmer, but Werner is definitedly right about one thing (he almost always is, by the way). It's scrolling performance on my older iPAQ was clunky, which is evidently attributable to the fact that the .NET Compact Framework is used. Clunky, but not horrible. It also kept crashing when using the back-button. The history feature wasn't really working, either. However, I'm not quite ready to give up on the product yet, because there are some things I like about it.

TouchBrowser excels in it's relative simplicity, and here is definitely where WM could take a "web" page from it....ouch! Sorry, couldn't resist adding a cheesy pun in there somewhere. Anyway, I don't want to have to pull out the stylus, and hunt around through a bunch of sub-menus, especially when learning a new product. TouchBrowser slaps the main buttons across the top of the screen (there aren't many), and periodically performs a show/hide of the control menu. The default browser view is the whole display and uses the obnoxious "desktop-view" mode, and here I agree with Werner again--It should save the compact view setting, as it is the better choice. I still like the direction and originality the programmer demonstrated with this product, even if the stability is not quite there yet. If Makayama can address the crashing, reduce the memory overhead, and get the features to work reliably, TouchBrowser could become a promising mobile browser enhancement.