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Browser

Android's default web browser is based on WebKit and can render full HTML web sites. The browser is very capable and looks fantastic on the Zio's screen. You can use your finger to navigate around screens, or (attempt to) use the trackball to zoom through them. You can perform basic browsing with the phone in portrait or landscape orientation.

A quick press of the menu key opens up a dock with most of the navigation items you'd expect. There is a full list of settings that let you customize how the browser operates (such as enabling / disabling JavaScript, managing passwords and privacy and more). The options are quite extensive.

I like that the browser lets you open multiple windows at a time. This lets you jump around between different web sites quickly. The browser also supports Google's MyLocation feature, which will help provide local results when you perform searches.

As far as browser performance is concerned, it worked great over Wi-Fi. Over the 1x network I was able to find, web sites loaded very slowly.

Customize

You can customize the Zio about as much as you can customize any phone. Wallpapers and ringtones are easily altered. You can rearrange all of the menu items, clutter up the home screen with icons and more. What you can't do is change the basic theme of the Zio, such as the color combinations of the menus and screens. This is one area where I think Android needs to start making strides. Either Google's coding engineers need to do it, or the device makers and network operators need to step it up and put some themes and color options on there.

There are pretty robust ways to manage the security of the device, control how applications are managed, how the microSD slot is managed, how data is synchronized, how location information is reported and on and on.

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