I gave my quick impressions of my new Palm Treo Pro a while ago now but wanted to follow up with a few notes of the browsing experience. When I switched to the Treo Pro I also switched browser from Opera Mobile to Iris Browser, a lightweight webkit based browser.

Since the switch I haven’t looked back and for a number of reasons. First off when I say lightweight I mean incredibly so, even with multiple tabs open only a fraction of the memory when compared to Opera Mobile and at no loss of performance or in anyway reducing the experience. The rendering is fast, probably the fastest I have experienced of the non server side rendered browsers. This coupled with the better HSDPA signal when using the Treo Pro mean that I am using my device for more and more browsing.

One of the other interesting points to note is a recent update to version 1.1.9 has changed the way certain sites are displayed. When visiting m.facebook.com or google.co.uk/reader I now receive the iphone version of these mobile sites,  which is a far better experience that the standard mobile versions of these sites. I hate to say that I’m grateful to Apple for giving the web masters of these sites an excuse to build a custom version for the iphone but in this case its a real bonus.

All of the above points are really making a case for me switching to the Treo Pro from my trust HTC Diamond on a permanent basis.