• Handspring

• $20

• 16-Bit Color
• Very Fast Loading
• Great Bookmarking
• Universal Product

• Caching needs work
• Lack of Content

Design:
Cost/benefit:
Coolness:
Overall:

Installation
You can purchase Blazer at Handango for $20 or it comes bundled with the new Treo. It ships in two versions, Windows.zip and a Macintosh.sit, and there's no difference between the two other than the compression method. Install the 352k file and you're ready.

Connection
There's a few different ways to connect using Blazer so I'll run though them. There are several modems available for your handheld including the VisorPhone, PalmModem, Handspring Modem, Xircom SpringPort Modem, and Novatel Minstrel modems. You can also establish an Internet connection through the infrared (IR) port of certain cell phones, or just using a cell phone connection cable. If you've got a dial-up modem, you can use an ISP. Using the configuration settings that most Internet connection set-ups come with, it's very easy to connect. In fact, Blazer requires no specific Web configuration by itself at all.

Usability
To begin, Blazer is very fast. It uses a proxy server, and that equals speed far greater than most other browsers. Some of the people who've used it on my handheld report that it loads faster than their home dial-up connections. Whether that's my Minstrel m500 wireless modem,or it's just the browser, I'm not sure. However, I believe that it's a combination because text usually appears on screen in about a second, with a 10k web site such as the Palm version of Palm Infocenter totally loading in about 5 seconds.

Blazer also has a great bookmarks scheme, and you can save a hundred different ones. This leads to one of my problems with the whole wireless Web, because, frankly, I only have 20. Fortunately, Blazer's default home page (which can be switched), is set to an incredibly useful search/mobile directory page made by Handspring with lots of different sites.

The colors in Blazer are also fantastic. 16-bit images looks just as nice as the ones you can load in SplashPhoto, and that's one of the best parts. Most other browsers can only support up to 256-colors, which isn't pretty on an m505, but 16-bit photos are great looking.

Also, if you don't go to a native Palm site, the content is still very viewable. Blazer automatically shrinks down the images to viewable sizes, and preserves most of the order. What's especially cool is if you go to a page with frames, Blazer will allow you to pick which one to view. Needless to say, you won't be getting any pop-up camera ads.

My only real problem with Blazer is the caching system, because it's not done very intelligently. It uses a strange method of caching images, as well as whole pages. For example, Blazer is not an off-line browser but it saves lots of pages to a cache. That wouldn't be a problem with a static page, but with a news site that constantly changes, Blazer often just goes right to the cached page instead of checking whether there's a new version online.

Another problem is clicking Refresh to actually check for new content makes all the images reload too, which is a real pain. A great example is ESPN, which has a never-changing banner of links at the top, and a picture and a story in the middle. Every time I go, I'd have to refresh every image, doubling the amount of time it should take. Eventually, I just set the cache size to zero so it wouldn't hold any pages in memory.

Conclusion
In the end, this is by far the best Palm browser out there. The price is great for what it is, and while it is more expensive than others, there's no other browser with similar features, because Blazer is leagues ahead of all the rest.