Palm Pre Basics - #12 - Web Browsing on the Palm Pre

Butterscotch Tutorial Special. Palm Pre Basics. Part Twelve of Twelve: Browsing on the Palm Pre. Jay Goldman: Hi I'm Jay Goldman the host of Mr. Mobile. Today we're going to take a look at the web browser on the Palm Pre. The browser is located in the launcher under Web. The Pre's browser is based on WebKit the open source rendering engine from Apple which is also the basis for Safari on the Mac Windows and iPhone and for Google Chrome. It means you get a really good browsing experience with very web standard complaint rendering and so you shouldn't have trouble viewing almost every website out there. The browser open on this page which gives you access to things that you've added to it as sites you visit on a regular basis. You can also enter a URL or search term directly on the top. By tapping on one of these will take you straight to that website. If you are browsing a website and decide that you'd like to go somewhere else you simply grab the screen and pull down to access the address bar. Tap into the bar and then open the keyboard which will allow you to type anything you'd like. If we for example wanted to compare this with Apple's website we could start typing directly in there and it will give us shortcut options for accessing a search on Google or Wikipedia for the term or I can continue to type and then hit the return key and it will take me to that URL. The browser supports gestures as many of other palm applications do and so I can use the gesture area at the bottom of screen to go back and forward without having to use the buttons on the screen. Back is a simple swipe the left and forward is simple swipe to the right. As with most mobile browsers the Pre's browser does not support Flash, so I can use the pinch and zoom here to zoom in on this and I'll see that this is actually a flash movie that doesn't load on the Pre and so I am not actually able to watch the ad despite of telling you that I can there. The web menu gives me access to common things like adding a book mark and also allows me to add this page to my launcher which is what I see when I launch the web browser for the first time. The new card option in here allows me to actually effectively open a new tab or window as I might do on a desktop browser which will open another instance of the web browser itself and you can see that I have two of them open here. The web browser allows me to share pages out directly from here in the page menu so I can tap on share. And now we'll open a new message, attach a screen shot of the image and allow me to type in the name of the person that I'd like to share with. Note that I am now inside of an email application and so the browser is still available and I can cancel this or close it by just swiping it up. As with most applications on the Palm Pre the accelerometer allows me to turn the screen sideways in order to gain access to the wider viewing and see things slightly larger. One note about the Pre as opposed to cell phones with a soft keyboard, because the keyboard is only on the right side, although I can browse in this mode if I tap into a field requiring me to enter text I will next to turn the phone back this way in order to be able to type. Thanks for watching our episode about web browsing on the Palm Pre. Stay tuned for the rest of our series to learn more about your device. Butterscotch - Tasty Tech; Delicious Downloads. Butterscotch.com, a division of Tucows Corp. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/