Dolphin celebrated the 80 millionth install of their third party web browser for Android and iOS by releasing Dolphin Browser, version 10, for Android. And, adding even more features to an already feature-rich mobile web browser, what a celebration it is. But the greatest of these is speed - so fast it may change your entire relationship with your old smartphone. Seriously.
Prologue
When it comes to smartphones, most of the things we talk about on Latinos Post Tech are the best and newest devices on the market today. That, of course, makes sense, because that's what the news is. But that doesn't mean that all of our readers, or even the writers, use the very latest or best devices in their daily lives. I won't speak for anyone else, but I am using a mid-range HTC smartphone, which I've haven't replaced for a couple years at least.
As you may expect, my experience of my old-timer personal smartphone has gotten more and more limited as my phone swiftly reaches its last moments of decrepitude.
Google Talk, that works. Checking email? We're good. Mindlessly flipping through a Twitter feed while waiting in line? Can do. Trying out new apps is possible in most cases, too, as long as I quit most running processes and quickly delete the apps before my meager storage space gives up.
But browsing the web is such a pain that I had all but given up on the idea. A mixture of my smartphone having a processor and operating system that can't keep up with ever-more sophisticated webpages, plus my 3G wireless connection, increasingly makes browsing feel like it did back in the old beige CRT-screen 56K-modem days. I got a faster browser (Dolphin) long ago, but that didn't help much, so I mostly look at the few bookmarks I've kept on my home screen from time to time, send pages to Pocket while browsing the internet on my computer, and otherwise avoid mobile web browsing like the plague.
Who knows, you might understand what I'm talking about.
Speed, Speed, Speed!
So imagine my surprise when, a little after midnight on Wednesday, I opened one of those bookmarks and saw that my Dolphin Browser had updated to version 10.
I ignored the introductory walkthrough and went right on to the webpage I wanted, thinking it would take a few minutes to load. But then...wait... What!? It had already loaded! And it wasn't a fluke; every link I clicked loaded a webpage like my senescent phone was brand new. I did this for half an hour, getting more and more excited with every fast, successful page load.
Hal-leh-lu-ja!
Other Features
Dolphin Browser version 10 features more than speed, of course. They've revamped the entire user interface, with a handy Dolphin launcher in the bottom corner that brings up a tab selector, browser menu, or their Sonar speech recognition feature. The home screen is a beautiful, customizable experience, with nice wallpapers, a most-visited sites slot, and various sites or web apps that you can add for easy access one-click access.
There's also a web app store, which features apps like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Wikipedia, but also Android apps from Google Play for your phone. I found an app called "Easy Battery Saver" which has extended the life of my elderly battery, though Dolphin can't take much credit for that, other than helping me find it through their app store.
Other additions to Dolphin include native Flash support, with a smart option to either have the Flashplayer always on, off, or "on demand." Another improvement is Dolphin's search feature, which now lets you use Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo (for the paranoid), and Yandex, a Russian search engine.
In Conclusion
I can't speak for people with different (and probably much better) smartphones than mine, but for people with older Android phones, I cannot recommend more highly the new Dolphin Browser version 10 for you. I don't know what they changed in the programming infrastructure of the app to make it faster, nor do I know if they particularly tried to make browsing faster: it wasn't one of their touted features of version 10.
All I know is that, in my experience, Dolphin now has me browsing the web again - and it's given my smartphone a new lease on life. If you don't have a Samsung Galaxy S4 or HTC One, it's worth a try, because it could extend the life-value of your old Android smartphone. And if you do have a nice new smartphone, I can't imagine how insanely fast your web browsing experience may become using Dolphin.
Download it here. If you have Dolphin, but don't have auto-update enabled, you might have gotten a notification already to update it. Update it. No need to thank me.