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The HTC Salsa's 800MHz processor is excellent when it comes to browsing and shifting web pages. Text isn't quite as sharp on screen as found in the bigger, high-res 4-inch superphones, but despite the HTC Salsa's modest 320 x 480 resolution everything's nicely readable.
The Salsa supports full multi-touch zooming, with users able to pinch the screen with two fingers for a closer look at pages – which it does quickly and without any obvious glitches, even on the busy TechRadar home page.
Double-tapping a text area quickly zooms in and reflows the copy, making it a great device to use as a general web browser.
The HTC Sense user interface also includes the same tabbed browsing system as seen in the Wildfire S and HTC Sensation, with a pinch of the screen zooming your display out and popping up a scrolling icon list of all your current open web pages. This is very slow to respond while pages are loading, but once they've popped up it's a great way of managing browsing sessions.
Bookmarks are handled via the menu button, with the HTC Salsa enabling users to sort their collections via tags, view a generated list of most popular pages and browse their entire history. Plus Android enables you to save bookmarks as quick-launch icons on your Home screen for quick access – or you can dump them all in a folder.
If a page has an obvious RSS feed, an icon will appear beside the URL bar. Tapping this prompts you to add the feed to HTC's own news reader app, which also automatically pulls in any RSS feeds you may have added to Google's own web-based Reader.
Sadly, there's no official support for Adobe's Flash Player, thanks to the Salsa's processor apparently not having enough power to run it. However, HTC has supplied its own "Flash Lite" plug-in, which does allow the phone to play some forms of embedded video...
...although YouTube embeds refused to play, which is a pretty big hole in its functionality. But on the whole, the Salsa works well as a mobile browser. As long as you're not hoping to watch iPlayer in bed.
