Netfront was a very good browser served as an alternative to Pocket
Internet Explorer back in the days until Opera came out with much more
features. Now Netfront doesn't wanna stay behind and so comes up with much more features.

Watch the small video to see how it works. And read more for the review.

To begin with, the installtion was all normal through a .cab file. But the browser takes approximately 6-8secs to load the first time when you start the application from your Programs list. Never mind, go ahead.

Page Layout and Rendering

If you see, Pocket Internet explorer does not render the page exactly the same way as you see on a Desktop PC. But Netfront will do it! And it even has a virtual canvas kind which lets you choose different resolutions such as widescreen mode or so. Your Pocket PC doesn't really support those kinda high resolutions but it is helpfull when different websites render differently in certain resolutions. By default, the perfect resolution is chosen for you and so no confusions.

Navigation 

This is where Netfront seems to win over other browsers. You can drag the pages very easily with a stylus andit is so fast moving around unlike other browsers. When you double tap on the screen, you get the entire page zoomed out onto the screen and a small outline inside it will let you drag throughout the page and select the desired location. This is somewhat close to the iPhone's Safari browser but yea no other pocket pc browser does that so perfectly as Netfront.

Memory Usage: 

Tabbed browsing and other features that are getting common for newest browsers is all available. Opening more than one website really consumes a lot of memory and the application ended up saying "Insufficient Memory" So don't think about multi-browsing on such a small screen.

Additional Features: 

• Tabbed browsing
  
• Smart-Fit or Coloumn rendering
• Swift Navigation
• PageMap
• and much more..

Known issues:

• No technical support is available for this concept version
• If
  NetFront Browser is installed on external storage, the application’s
  behavior becomes unstable when the device is turned on or off
• Integrated Windows Authentication for IIS is not supported
• You have to exit NetFront Browser to activate scheduled Auto-Cruise

Pricing and availability:

Currently they have a beta version or a similar kind naming concept version which works until March 31st 2008 

Having competition from other companies such as Opera, we guess it might be released with a competitive pricing

Take a testdrive here.