The folks behind the popular Dolphin Browser HD for Google Android smartphones have released a public beta of Dolphin for Pad. It’s basically what you get when you take Dolphin and tweak it to run on tablets with high resolution displays and the Google Android Honeycomb operating system. You can also run the standard Dolphin HD browser on a tablet, but the new app has a few tweaks that make it a little nicer to use.
Dolphin Browser for Pad supports add-ons and tabbed browsing, just like the smartphone app. There are also sidebars that you can open by swiping from the left or right side of the screen. But instead of moving the whole browser window, the sidebars now slide over the top of the window to display bookmarks or open tabs.
Other things that set Dolphin apart from the standard Android web browser include support for touch-based gestures, the ability to store your cache on an SD card instead of internal storage, an option to change your user agent to Desktop, iPhone, or iPad, and the ability to change the behavior of your volume buttons: You can use them to scroll through web pages or cycle through browser tabs if you like.
You can download Dolphin for Pad v1.0 beta for free from the Android Market, or just check out my hands-on video after the break… or both.